The Heroides. 15.

 15. Sappho to Phaon

When these letters, from my eager hand, are examined
are any of them known to your eyes, straight away, as mine?
Or would you not know where this work came from
in short, unless you’d read the name of its author, Sappho?
Indeed, perhaps you ask why my lines alternate,
when I’m more suited to the lyric mode:
my love is weeping: it’s elegiac verse that weeps:
I don’t set any of my tears to the lyre.
I’m scorched, as a cornfield burns, its rich crop set alight
by a wild south-easterly, bringing lightning.
Phaon frequents the far fields of Typhœus’s Etna:
passion grips me no less fiercely than Etna’s fire.
Songs to the well-tuned strings don’t rise in me:
song is the work of a mind at leisure.
Nor do the girls of Pyrrha, or Methymna delight me,
nor the rest of the Lesbian throng.
Worthless is Anactoria, lovely Cydro’s worthless, to me,
while Atthis isn’t pleasing to my eyes,
nor a hundred others that I’ve loved guiltily.
Cruel man, one alone has what was a multitude’s!
Beauty is yours, years suited to loving,
oh, treacherous beauty to my eyes!
Take up the lyre, and archery – you’ll surely become Apollo:
add horns to your head – it’s Bacchus that you’ll be.
And Phoebus loved Daphne: Bacchus loved Ariadne,
neither she nor she knew the lyric mode.
But the Muses compose the sweetest songs for me:
now, my name is sung throughout the world:
Alcaeus is not more praised, who shares the lyre
and my country, even though he may sound more grand.
If nature, being difficult, denies me beauty,
my genius repays beauty’s loss.
I’m small. But mine’s a name that fills every country:
I reveal the measure of the name itself.
If I’m not pale, Andromeda pleased Perseus,
dark with the colour of her father Cepheus’s land.
and often white pigeons mate with other hues,
and the dark turtledove’s loved by emerald birds.
If nothing but what’s possessed by beauty will seem worthy to you,
none will be yours in future, none will be yours in future!
But when I read my poems, I seemed beautiful enough, indeed
you swore I was the only one, fit to speak for ever.
I sang, I remember (lovers remember everything),
and, while I sang, you gave me stolen kisses.
Those too you praised, I pleased you in all ways
but especially there, where Love’s work was done.
Then you enjoyed my playfulness more than ever
and endless teasing, appropriate laughing words,
and when we were both abandoned to pleasure,
that deepest languor of our weary bodies.
Now Sicilian girls come to you as new prizes.
What is Lesbos to me? I wish I were Sicilian.
Oh you Nisean mothers, and Nisean daughters,
send back the wanderer from your shores!
Don’t let the lying endearments of his tongue deceive you:
what he says to you, he said before to me.
You also Venus, Erycina, who frequents Sicilian hills
(since I am yours) look to your poet, goddess!
Or must my painful fate fulfil its tender beginning,
and always be bitter in its course.
Six birthdays had gone when my father’s bones, gathered
before his time, drank of my tears.
Helplessly, Charaxus, my brother, captivated, burnt with love
of a whore, and suffered disgraceful losses, mixed with shame.
He wanders, poverty stricken, over the blue sea, with fast oars,
and sinfully seeks now, the wealth he sinfully lost.
He hates me too, because, from great loyalty, I warned him, clearly:
that’s what frankness, and conscientiousness brought me.
And just as what I miss torments me, endlessly,
so a young daughter adds to my cares.
You give me a final reason for complaint:
our ship’s not driven by favourable winds.
Look, my scattered hair lies lawlessly about by neck,
no bright jewels clasp my fingers.
I’m covered by cheap cloth, no gold’s in my hair,
my tresses hold no perfumed gifts of Araby.
Unhappy, for whom should I dress, for whom labour to please?
The sole author of my adornments has gone.
My heart’s easily vulnerable, and to slender weapons,
and often the cause is that I often love,
Either the Fatal Sisters uttered it as a law, at my birth,
and no thread of discipline was granted to my life,
or inclination becomes habit, and my muse Thalia,
my instructress in art, made my genius prone to love.
Why wonder if men in their first youth captivated me
and those years in which a man’s first able to love?
I should fear lest you steal him away, Aurora, in place of Cephalus!
(and you would, but your first love holds you! )
If the Moon goddess should see him, she who sees everything,
it’s Phaon, not Endymion, who’ll be ordered to remain asleep.
Venus might have carried him off into the sky, in her ivory chariot,
but she might think he’d please Mars, himself.
Oh lovely years: not yet a man, nor still a boy,
Oh honour and great glory of your age,
come to me, handsome one, sink into my arms again:
I don’t ask you should love, only let yourself be loved!
I write, and my eyes are wet with rising tears:
look at the many blots here in this place.
If you were so certain of leaving, you might have behaved better,
and at least have said: ‘Woman of Lesbos, farewell!’
You carried away no tears, no kisses of mine:
in short I felt no fear of the pain that was.
Nothing of you is left me, only injury. Nor have you
any token of love to remind you.
I gave you no requests. Nor truly should I have given any,
except that you should not be unmindful of me.
I swear, by Love who is never far from you,
and by the Nine Muses, my divinities,
when whoever it might be said to me: ‘Your joys depart’,
I couldn’t cry for ages, nor could I speak:
tears indeed failed my eyes, words failed my tongue,
my heart was frozen by an icy chill.
When grief came to itself, I was not ashamed
to beat my breast, and howl as I tore my hair,
no differently than that holy mother who carries the body,
of her dead son, empty of life, to the heaped-up pyre.
My brother Charaxus delights in, thrives on, my misery,
and he reappears and fades before my eyes,
And that the reason for my grief might seem shameful,
he says: ‘Why grieve at this? Surely her daughter lives!’
Shame and love do not come together: all the crowd saw:
I was there with torn clothes and naked breasts.
You’re my care, Phaon: you’re restored to me in dreams –
dreams brighter than the beauty of the day.
There I find you, though you’re far from this sphere:
but the joys of sleep don’t last for long enough.
often your arms feel the weight of my neck,
often I seem to place mine beneath yours.
I recognise the kisses you engaged in with your tongue,
and used to be ready to take, and to give.
Now and then I caress you, and speak words that are almost real,
and my lips alone guard my thoughts –
I blush to tell more, but everything takes place –
and I please – and I’m not allowed to thirst.
But when the Sun shows himself, and all things along with him,
then I complain that sleep’s quickly left me:
I seek the caves and woods, as if the woods and caves
might help me: they have shared my pleasures.
Then I suffer a vacant mind that resembles fearful Enyo’s,
goddess of war, with hair loose about her neck.
I see rough tufa that hangs from the caves,
that to me was the equal of Phrygian marble:
I find the grove again, which often offered us a bed,
and hid us with a host of shadowy leaves.
But I do not find the lord of woods and me,
the place itself is worthless – he was its dowry.
I recognise crushed herbs in the familiar turf:
the grass was bent by our weight.
I’ve lain down, and touched the place where you were:
a herb, that welcomed me before, drinks my tears.
Indeed the very branches seem to mourn with falling leaves
and there are no birds sweetly singing.
Only Procne, grief-stricken mother, unholy punisher of her husband,
as a bird now, sings of Thracian Itys of Daulis.
The bird sings of Itys: Sappho of forsaken love:
so far, they’re, otherwise, as silent as midnight.
There’s a sacred fountain, shining, clearer than any crystal:
many think a divine spirit lives there.
Over it water-lotus unfolds its branches, itself a grove,
the earth is green with tender turf.
Here, when, weeping, I laid down my weary limbs,
a Naiad stood before my eyes:
she stood there and said: ‘Since you burn with the fires of injustice,
Ambracia’s the land to be sought by you.
Apollo on the heights watches the open sea:
summoning the people of Actium and Leucadia.
Here Deucalion, fired by love of Pyrrha, cast himself down,
and struck the sea without harming his body.
Without delay love turned and fled, from his slowly sinking
breast: Deucalion was eased of his passion.
The place obeys that law. Seek out the Leucadian height
right away, and don’t be afraid to leap from the rock!
As she as instructing me, she vanished, with her voice. I rose,
chilled, and the tears ceased flowing from my eyes.
I’ll go, oh Nymph, and seek the rock you’ve shown me:
let fear be far from me, conquered by frantic love.
Whatever comes will be better than what is. Breeze,
support me – indeed, my body has no great weight.
You also, sweet Love, lift me on your wings as I fall,
lest my death be charged to Leucadia’s waters.
Then I’ll set up my lyre to Phoebus, the gift we share,
and beneath it this pair of verses, one below the other:
‘The grateful poetess, Sappho, sets up this lyre, to you, Apollo:
appropriate to me, it is appropriate for you.’
Still, why do you send me, unhappy, to Actium’s shore,
when you yourself could turn your wandering feet back to me?
You’d be better for me than Leucadia’s waves:
and you could be Phoebus to me, in beauty and kindness.
Perhaps if I die, oh you, fiercer than any cliff or sea,
might bear the infamy of my death?
Ah how much better to join my thoughts to yours,
than that they should be given to the rocks in headlong fall!
These are they, Phaon, which you used to praise
and seemed to you to be so ingenious.
I wish I was eloquent now! Pain obstructs art
and my ills put paid to every talent.
My old powers of song won’t awaken for me:
the plectrum falls silent through grief, and silent the lyre.
Lesbian women of the waves, those to be married: those married,
Lesbian women, names sung to the Aeolian lyre,
Lesbian women, beloved women, who made me infamous,
cease to come, in a crowd, to the melodies of my lyre!
Phaon has stolen what pleased you so before,
ah me! I nearly said, as once I did: ‘My Phaon.’
Make him return. Your singer too will return.
He gave my genius power: he snatched it away.
Do I rouse his savage heart moved by my prayers, or does it freeze,
and the west winds carry away my fleeting words?
I wish those that carry them would bring back your sails:
That, if you only knew it, sluggard, would be the right thing to do.
If you are returning, and prepare a votive offering for the stern,
why torment my heart by your delay?
Loose your ship! Venus, born from the sea, offers the sea to lovers.
The winds will give you way – only loose your ship!
Cupid himself will pilot it, settled on the stern:
he’ll furl and unfurl the sails himself, with his delicate hand.
If you wish to flee far from Sappho of Greece,
(you’ll still find no reason why I’m worthy of being shunned)
a harsh letter might at least speak that misery,
so that death might be sought by me in Leucadia’s waters.