Around 2,600 years ago, on the Greek island of Lesbos, a woman wrote poems about love, desire, friendship, memory and the moon. Her name was Sappho. The ancient world admired her so much that Plato, according to a later epigram, called her the tenth Muse.
Her poems were collected into several books. Then, over the centuries, almost all of them were lost. Today we have one complete poem and hundreds of fragments, some recovered from quotations by later writers, some from scraps of ancient papyrus. Some fragments are a few lines long. Others are only a word or two.
What the fragments say
Even in pieces, Sappho's voice is unmistakable. She writes about the physical shock of seeing someone you love: the tongue failing, a fire running under the skin, the ears ringing. She writes about missing a friend who has gone away, about evening bringing back everything the dawn scattered, about the moon setting and the night passing while she lies alone.
In one of her most famous fragments, she says that some people think the most beautiful thing on earth is an army of horsemen, or of soldiers, or a fleet of ships. But she says it is whatever one loves.
Why fragments are perfect for slow reading
A fragment can't be skimmed. There's so little of it that every word matters, and the gaps become part of the poem. You fill them with your own imagination, your own longing. Reading Sappho is almost a meditation: a few words, then silence.
How to read her slowly
1. Find a good translation. Many are available, from older public domain versions to beautiful modern ones. 2. Read one fragment only. Not a whole page, just one. 3. Read it aloud, slowly. Pause at each gap or bracket. 4. Close your eyes and imagine what's missing. What might she have said? 5. Ask yourself what you long for. Then let it be, without judging it.
Longing, on paper
Sappho's fragments remind us that even a few words, written with feeling, can travel thousands of years. The Letter & Magazine subscription sends you a letter and a postcard every month, with a meditation and a story about art inside, plus a seasonal issue of "(meditating) On Art". Words written to be kept, for as long as they last.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi