SapphosBreathing.com
Title
Sappho's Breathing
Description
Sappho: a review by Emily Wilson
The Guardian reprints a fine essay from the London Review of Books by American classicist Emily Wilson in which she reviews three new books about Sappho: Anne Carson's gorgeous new translation If Not, Winter; Margaret Reynolds' The Sappho History; and Erica Jong's novel, Sappho's Leap. And in case you're wondering where a certain pseudonym comes from:
According to ancient legend, Sappho was bisexual. After various affairs with girls, she supposedly fell in love with a ferryman called Phaon, and threw herself off the Leucadian Rock in order to rid herself of her passion. This influential story, which goes back at least as far as Menander, was probably inspired by allusions in Sappho's poetry to an Adonis-like myth about the ageing Aphrodite and a young sun deity called Phaon (perhaps identifiable with Phaethon).
The legend was widely known in post-classical times through an Ovidian or pseudo-Ovidian epistle, "Sappho to Phaon", and assumed a central position in almost all later responses to the poet. Later writers often use the story of the Leucadian leap as a misogynistic fable, an emblem of the comeuppance awaiting any woman who is too intellectual and too highly sexed.
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