I’ve been reading If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, a translation of Sappho’s poetry by Anne Carson, and last night came upon one I had been VERY curious about how she would approach:
The book. Fragment 102. On the left, two lines of Greek text:
Γλύκηα μᾶτερ, οὔ τοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἴστον
πόθῳ δάμεισα παῖδος βραδίναν δι’ Ἀφροδίταν.
And on the right, Anne Carson’s translation:
sweet mother I cannot work the loom
I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite
I, of course, being Too Online that I am, am more familiar with this translation, by Diane J. Rayor:
Sweet mother, I cannot weave–
slender Aphrodite has overcome me
with longing for a girl.
So of course I wondered, What Is The Truth? Anne Carson provides lots of end-notes on word usage and historical context, but was fully and uncharacteristically silent on this one.
When looking into it, the word Sappho used for the object of her longing is παῖδος, paîdos, which is most commonly translated as “youth” because it’s not gendered. It can mean either a boy or a girl.
So, whether Sappho is overcome by Aphrodite with longing for a boy or for a girl is, in fact, translator’s choice. (There are reasons besides heteronormative assumptions for translating it as “boy”—though the word is not gendered, it’s cognate with a lot of words like puer that mean “son” so may have had a more masculine-as-default assumption (like a lot of European languages do), and when Sappho wrote about young women, the word she commonly used was παρθένος parthénos “young woman, maiden, virgin.” But paîs/paîdos it is not a gendered word and could be translated either way!)
And honestly now I appreciate the cleverness of ones who find workarounds to avoid gendering the one she’s longing for, to be more honest to what she actually wrote.
