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by Eleni Sikelianos

Eleni Sikelianos has published several books of poems, including To Speak While Dreaming, The Book of Tendons, and The Lover’s Numbers. Her poems have appeared in Zoum-Zoum, Grand Street, Sulfur, the Quarterly, and other magazines. The following was excerpted from her essay “Some Greek Girls: Using Sappho and Praxilla,” in Classics in the Classroom: Using Great Literature to Teach Writing.(Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1999).

Sikelianos Talks Sappho

At Manhattan’s PS 19, it was Women’s History Month and a sixth-grade teacher had requested that we read women poets. Another teacher was doing a unit on Ancient Greece and wanted me to focus on Greek poets. Who would fit the bill better than Sappho? I had taught Sappho at the college and high school levels, yet it had never occurred to me to use her poems with young students. Her poems seemed too sophisticated, and it’s hard to talk about Sappho without talking about love and sex. But why not talk about Sappho simply in terms of intensity of feeling? Usually I don’t ask kids directly to express their feelings in poems, because it seems too solicited and it’s hard for them to escape cliches. They tend to express their feelings anyway, in much more interesting ways, when they write about, say, dreams or colors. But these were classes of sixth-graders, eleven- and twelve-year-olds already battling (or exalting in?) massive hormone diffusion. I decided to try out a poem of Sappho’s that I use with college students: “Fragment 31,” in which she turns “greener than grass” with jealousy.

I began by giving a little history. I told the students that most of Sappho’s poems were lost, and that all we have left are fragments. I told them the story about the papyri being recovered from a mummified crocodile’s mouth. This is a real attention-getter; afterwards, the students are game for anything. “The gender of one’s sexual partner may have been irrelevant to the ancient Greeks,” according to Page duBois, but to many contemporary Americans, it is not. Brave souls may use Sappho as an opportunity to dive into the subject of homosexuality; others may want to say simply that Sappho was from an island in the Aegean close to the coast of Turkey. Here is most of “Fragment 31,” which the translator Willis Barnstone calls “Seizure.”

To me he seems like a god
the man who sits facing you
and hears you near as you speak
softly and laugh

in a sweet echo that jolts
the heart in my ribs. For now
as I look at you my voice
is empty and

can say nothing as my tongue
cracks and slender fire is quick
under my skin. My eyes are dead
to light, my ears

pound, and sweat pours over me.
I convulse, greener than grass,
and feel my mind slip as I
go close to death. . . .

At this point, what we have breaks off into fragments. Part of the poem’s beauty is its ambiguity: who is the speaker jealous of, the man who is doing all the talking or the woman who is being talked to, or both¹? Catullus tried his hand at translating this poem, and Longinus admired how Sappho “summons at the same time soul body hearing tongue sight color, all as though they had wandered off apart from herself².”

Yet the emotions are not ambiguous. I asked the kids at PS 19 to tell me what was going on with poor old Sappho. Several students immediately shouted out, “She’s jealous!” Why? “She sees her guy talking to someone else.” I asked them to tell me what happens to Sappho’s body when she sees these two talking. “Her heart jumps, she can’t hear anything, her tongue cracks, there’s a fire under her skin, she can’t see, she hears thunder, she starts sweating. . . . She’s dead.” They liked the drama. Does she really die, or does she feel like she died? (Here answers varied.) Have any of you ever had really strong feelings about someone, feelings so strong that your ears buzz, you can’t see, and maybe you feel you’ve gone “close to death”? “Yes!” (of course). What kinds of feelings? When? “When my mom left, when Andrew punched me, when my grand-mother died, when my dad wouldn’t buy me a Sega 64, when I raise my hand and the poetry teacher goes to someone else. . . .” Okay, so what did it feel like? Describe what happened to you physically—make me really see it in an unusual way, so that I know exactly how you felt. Here are some of the poems they wrote:

THE GIRL I CANNOT HAVE

She looks very nice I like
her but cannot have her I laugh
at all her jokes that are not
funny I like her like I like
a beautiful day but when she
is with a boy I feel like a
bomb’s going to blow up

—Tarik Velez

I was happy to see that Tarik tried using enjambment, much like that in the Barnstone translation I had handed out, even though we hadn’t yet discussed line breaks.

BEATING UP ANDREW (Excerpt)

When Andrew plays jokes at me
I get angry
The feeling makes me want to punch him
Andrew makes me feel dumb
He makes me feel like fighting someone
But I don’t want to fight
So I try hard
not to show my feelings
My mind breaks and feels
like tornadoes coming
and going, to blow my mind away
My head turns
I can’t even think
Storms shake my body
It breaks me like
hard metal
I feel like fire is all over me
I can’t stand it
I don’t know how I am going to end it

—Mary Joyce (Mary J.) Tagatac

Although Mary J.’s poem is pretty much a straight imitation, I was impressed by how she expressed herself so directly about a difficult conflict, and by how the speaker’s feelings change. The poem begins with a long, blow-by-blow account of the mounting dispute, during which the poet mostly wants to fight. As the poem continues, the desire for retaliation diminishes; the author begins to focus on what happens to her physically, and how she might end the conflict. Since this poem, Mary J. has been writing up a storm, sometimes two or three poems a day.

¹ Translators have argued both sides, although in the original the pronouns make it fairly clear that Sappho is addressing the woman.

² Page duBois has pointed out that it is actually because of Longinus’s treatiseOn the Sublimethat we have Fragment 31. See duBois’s book Sappho is Burning. Chicago: University of Chicago,1995.