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SPEAKER_02: Hello, I'm Carmen Borca-Carrillo. I'm a producer at Wonder Media Network and I'm so excited to guest host during this final week of Pride Month. We're celebrating Pride Month with icons, supreme queens of queer culture. Some are household names, others are a little more behind the scenes. All of them have defied social norms and influenced generations of people to be unapologetically themselves. I'm so excited to be here today to be unapologetically themselves. Today, we're talking about an icon of antiquity, a forerunner of queer language, an architect of the very words we use to talk about queer identity today. While her own sexuality has been a subject of debate for centuries, her influence on poetry and her role in giving a name to love between women is undoubted. Let's talk about Sappho. Sappho's personal history is shrouded in mystery. She was likely born around 615 BC to an aristocratic family on the Greek island of Lesbos. She probably had several brothers and she probably married a wealthy man and had a daughter. She might have run an academy for unmarried young women. She might have been a priestess. She might have died young, throwing herself off a cliff after her heart was broken by a young sailor. Or she might have lived into old age, dying around 550 BC. What's for certain is that Sappho was a poet. Sappho dabbled in the popular epic form in which poetry was narrated by the gods, but her most famous works were written in first person. Her poetry was vivid and emotional. She spoke about passion and jealousy, love and hatred. She often wrote poems to be accompanied by a liar, a harp-like instrument. She also refined a lyric meter all her own, one so unique and influential, it's still called Sapphic meter. And of course, Sappho also lent her name and that of her home island to two words of queer importance, Sapphic, referring to the love between women, and lesbian. Even if we get today's word lesbian from Sappho's influence, it's not fair to refer to Sappho herself as a lesbian. For one, the word and its context didn't exist in ancient Greece. And as for Sappho herself, there's so few sources on her biography that it's impossible to truly know any facts about her sexuality. But certainly in her poetry, Sappho does express fondness for male and female subjects. ["The Little Mermaid"] Regardless, people have been obsessed with Sappho for forever. Plato famously called her the 10th muse. And even the earliest scholars of Sappho speculated about her sexuality. Three centuries after her death, writers of the new comedy, a Greek satire of Athenian society, ridiculed her as an overly promiscuous lover of women. In 1073, Pope Gregory reportedly burned her work for licentiousness. The Suda, the Byzantine encyclopedia where we get most of our information on Sappho, might be part of the problem. It lists Sappho's husband as Kirklius. It could be a legitimate name, or it could be a play on words, combining ancient Greek slang for man and penis, marrying the historically promiscuous Sappho off to a guy called Dick of Man, and likely recycling an old joke about Sappho's sexual appetite. Thanks to the passage of time and the persistence of rumors, very little of Sappho's poetry remains. Most are fragments, quotations via other authors. Her longest surviving poem is 28 lines long. As Sappho's poetry has revealed itself over hundreds of years, it's also been subject to the whims and values of those who find it and translate it. People who might want to come up with explanations and conditions to dampen Sappho's love for other women. Mysteries surround so much of Sappho's legend, but her poems, even the few fragments that survive, are simple, they're earnest, and utterly human. Here's an excerpt from a well-preserved piece, translated, of course, where she seems to long to trade places with a young male suitor. Like the very gods in my sight is he who sits where he can look into your eyes, who listens close to you, to hear the soft voice, its sweetness, murmur in love and laughter, all for him. Regardless of how her poems might've been interpreted in her lifetime, and regardless of Sappho's own personal inclinations, one thing is clear, Sappho is an icon, of poetry, of scandal, and of course, of love.
SPEAKER_01: All month, we're talking about icons.
SPEAKER_02: For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram, at Wamanica Podcast. Special thanks to Jenny and Liz Kaplan for inviting me to guest host. Talk to you tomorrow.
SPEAKER_01: For more information, visit Wamanica.org.
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