Ядом своим... перевод из Сапфо 610-580 до н. э

Ядом своим
неотразимым
и горько-сладким
 
от которого слабеют
руки и ноги, Любовь

подобно змее 
поражает меня

2015


With his venom
 
With his venom
irresistible
and bittersweet

that loosener
of limbs, Love

reptile-like
strikes me down

Translated by Mary Barnard

________

National Archaeological Museum Museum of Naples, Italy.
Portrait of Sappho, fresco from Pompeii.
 ***
 Национальный Археологический музей, Неаполь, Италия.
 Портрет Сапфо, фреска из Помпеи.
_________________

Платон. К Сапфо.
Девять лишь муз называя, мы Сапфо наносим обиду.
Разве мы в ней не должны музу десятую чтить?

Клавдий Элиан:
«Солон Афинский услышал, как его племянник поёт
песню Сапфо за бокалом вина, и она ему настолько
понравилась, что он попросил мальчика научить
его этой песне. Когда тот спросил его, зачем,
Солон ответил: „Чтобы я мог выучить её и умереть“».

***
Toute personne qui ;tait heureux en amour,
n'a pas de notion ; ce sujet.
  Jean Anouilh (1910-1987)

Тот, кто был счастлив в любви,
не имеет о ней никакого понятия.
 Жан Ануй (191-)1987)

***

   How Mary Barnard’32 Liberated
the Ancient Greek Poet from a Prison of Rhymes

For several centuries, Sappho was venerated.
In his first- century-AD treatise, “On The Sublime,
” the Greek critic Longinus reveled, “Are you not
amazed at how she evokes soul, body, hearing, tongue,
sight, skin, as though they were external and belonged
to someone else? And how at one and the same moment she


But just a few years later, in 180 AD, the theologian
Tatian dissed Sappho as a “pornikon erotomanes”—and
Christianity was only beginning its purifying ascent.
In 1073, according to one Renaissance writer,
Pope Gregory VII coordinated the burning of Sappho’s
work in both Rome and Constantinople.

The bonfires may be apocryphal. What matters is that
Sappho’s poems went out of vogue. The pottery bearing
her words turned into dust. The papyrus got tossed,
mostly, and all that remains is a few fragments—a line
here, a word there: a corpus so scant that it instills
longing. It’s as though we can hear Sappho’s voice,
just barely, calling out of the past, asking to be
heard and deciphered.
It is strange how things happen. You have a poet
who stood on a Greek isle singing into the wind,
and then 25 centuries later, in about 1930, a young
woman from Vancouver, Washington, tunes into Sappho
— and goes on, in 1958, to publish what many regard
as the definitive English language translation
of literature’s first significant female voice.
Mary Barnard ’32 was an established poet by the
1950s, celebrated for her spare evocations of
the Northwest landscape. Her slender book,
Sappho: A New Translation, excerpted throughout
this piece, is lucid and lean, delivering around
100 of the 200-odd extant Sappho fragments in free
verse, in plainspoken American idiom.