Tuesday 27 June 2017

Comments to my Sappho sources

First, we read what I said about those I had back in the days, right off my Paracritical Note:

«Cominciamo dalla prima da cui ho tratto: Vikiþíki. Chiaro che è incompleta, non mostra in alcun modo le incompletezze e le insicurezze del testo, e – ristrettamente all’Inno ad Afrodite – fa un sacco di errori di stumpa.
Da qui giungo a Bibliotheca Augustana. Gran bella fonte, che usa il dovuto apparato critico, sebbene usi il + per la crux desperationis. Talvolta non capisco le sue soluzioni, ma forse per mia inesperienza.
The Complete poems of Sappho, essendo «a lot of documents cobbled together after a lot of research», «un sacco di documenti mischiati insieme dopo un sacco di ricerche», non può certo pretendere di essere la fonte migliore. Tuttavia è più completa di Vikiþíki, offre talvolta interessanti soluzioni, e riporta varie utili traduzioni.
Da qui si giunge a safopoemas, ivi citato e linkato.
Prima il doc: è una buona fonte per i frammenti ivi antologizzati, tanto che è la sua soluzione che ho adottato per l’ad. Essendo un’antologia, è dichiaratamente incompleta, nel senso che non riporta tutti i frammenti.
Safopoemas... be’, ne ho già parlato sopra:
  1. Un macello di stupidissimi errori di stumpa che rendono spesso incomprensibile il testo che va ricostruito per poi essere letto; chissà che non si tratti di mojibake, ovvero che il mio computer abbia corrotto il documento sbagliando codifica;
  2. Dice che preferisce chi si trattiene dal completare troppo, e poi contraddittoriamente completa ove altri non completano, prendendo da Edmonds che in quest’arte è spregiudicato maestro, ed offrendo a volte anche interessanti soluzioni (vedasi Phíltatŏn Gaíaś gĕnŏś Ŏrránō tĕ);
  3. Traduce in verso libre, scelta che io non gradisco troppo; ho infatti sempre concepito poesia in opposizione a prosa, un po’ come Gorgia, “Τὴν ποίησιν ἅπαντα καὶ νομίζω καὶ ὀνομάζω λόγον ἔχοντα μέτρον”, “credo e nomino tutta la poesia un discorso avente metro”, dove il metro può essere il più vario possibile, ma deve esserci, mentre nel verso libre el gh’è no; c’è però anche un altro senso di poesia in Italiano, cioè qualcosa di “poetico”, affascinante, con pathos, cosa che però può esser fatta anche in prosa, dando luogo alla possibilità di espressioni apparentemente contraddittorie come poesia in prosa o poesia non poetica; questo senso può certo essere visto in poesie scritte in verso libre, sebbene non tutti i frammenti, secondo me, seguano questo tipo di poesia; può essere che il traduttore abbia curato i suoni e le parole in modo particolare; oppure che abbia scritto verso libre per farsi il figo quando avrebbe dovuto scrivere prosa.
Prima di Edmonds parliamo di Campbell. Campbell si propone di sostituire i Lyra Græca di Edmonds aggiungendo le nuove scoperte di materiale, e completando un po’ meno i testi. Questo è quello che fa, con giusto apparato critico e note su chi ha completato. Grenfell e Hunt sono una bella fonte, perché portano trascrizioni “crude” dei papiri e note sulle possibili letture di lettere dubbie, quando non immagini dei papiri. Chiaro che non possono essere esaustivi su Saffo, perché i Papiri di Ossirinco non sono l’unica fonte per Saffo, però in quel che hanno son di grande aiuto.
Or ne veniam da ultimo a Edmonds. Su di lui cito la prefazione del Campbell: «J. M. Edmonds' three volumes of Lyra Graeca have given useful service since their appearance some fifty years ago, but the time has come to replace them. Much new material has been unearthed; and Edmonds' version of the papyrus texts was spoiled by his excessive eagerness to fill the gaps», ossia «I tre volumi del Lyra Græca di J. M. Edmonds hanno fornito utili servizi dalla loro pubblicazione un cinquant’anni fa, ma è giunta l’ora di sostituirli. Molto nuovo materiale è stato dissotterrato; e la versione del testo del papiro di Edmonds è stata rovinata dalla sua eccessiva ansia di riempire i buchi». Penso che questo sia un giudizio sintetico e corretto: davvero costui completa troppo, anche se talvolta lo seguo. Basti pensare a quell’ΑΜΦ che vedete sopra nel testo Edmonds: lui si giustifica dicendo in nota «very tentatively restored by E.; many words even outside the brackets are very doubtfully legible, especially after 1. 9, cf. C.R. 1916. 131 : separation of the strophes uncertain», «restaurato molto tentativamente da E. molte parole anche fuori dalle parentesi sono molto dubbiosamente leggibili, specie dopo il v. 9, cf. C.R. 1916. 131 : separazione delle strofe incerta», ma nessun altra mia fonte riporta quelle lettere, tanto che io l’ho posto tra gli ΑΜΦ. Poi a volte taglia via dei pezzi, a volte ipereolicizza, a volte si inventa cose che non esistono, tipo il duale nell’Inno ad Afrodite (i passeri) quando il duale è solo dell’attico, o prŏtí per pĕrí, dove chiunque riporta pĕrí, e quindi la fonte doveva essere così, o dŏlŏ́plŏka per -ĕ, o altro. Comunque nella sua fantasia mi ha aiutato a completare certi frammenti, quindi è stato utile.»

That is to say:

«Let's start from the first one I took stuff from: Vikiþíki [Greek Wikisource; this is a phonetic rendition of the modern pronunciation of Βικιθήκη, Greek name of Wikisource, "þ" denoting the hard "th" sound of e.g. "thumb"]. It's clearly incomplete, it doesn't show the incompleteness and uncertainty of the text in any way, and – as far as the Hymn to Aphrodite is concerned – makes a lot of tiepos.
From here I get to Bibliotheca Augustana. Real nice source, which uses the proper critical apparatus, though it uses + for the crux desperationis [i.e. the dagger indicating places where we are at a loss for reconstructing what the manuscript or whatnot tradition has corrupted, e.g. the «πείθω / ἂψ σ' ἄγην» from the Hymn to Aphrodite, where a ton of different readings can be found in different editions/websites]. Sometimes I don't understand its solutions, but maybe it's due to my inexperience.
The Complete Poems of Sappho, being «a lot of documents cobbled together after a lot of reaserch», certainly cannot demand to be the best source. However it's more complete than Vikiþíki, it sometimes offers interesting solutions, and it reports various useful translations.
From here we come to safopoemas, therein mentioned and linked to [in the doc form which is no longer available, whereas my posts use the link to a seemingly identical pdf -- which has since been taken down, and in fact this source is no longer online as far as I can find; good riddance, I guess?].
The doc first [open link, I call it "the doc" because I downloaded it as a .doc file back in the days]: it's a good source for the fragments therein anthologized, so much so that I adopted its solution for fragment ad [numbered ad because I used the numbering from Vikiþíki and it was not there, and those that weren't there I ordered randomly (or at least I have no clue what numbering I followed) and numbered with letters, so a, b, …, z, aa, ab, ac, ad, …, az, ba, bc, …, bl]. Being an anthology, it's declaredly incomplete, in the sense that it doesn't report all the fragments.
Safopoemas... well I already talked about it above [further above in the Paracritical Note, when safopoemas is first mentioned, where among other things I said «Safopoemas.doc è un reperto da una citazione di The Complete Poems of Sappho, per inciso. Quest’orribile documento mi spinge a tradurre i frammenti anche in Spagnolo, così finalmente ci sarà una traduzione in poesia di testi non corrotti, traduzione senza invenzioni o completamenti solo della traduzione, come quella di safopoemas.doc.», or «Safopoemas.doc is a finding from a mention by The Complete Poems of Sappho, incidentally. This horrible document makes me willing to translate the fragments in Spanish as well, so there will finally be a translation of uncorrupted texts into poetry, a translation without inventions and completions made only in the translations, as is instead that of safopoemas.doc», and note that my Spanish level isn't that high, so translating everything into poetry would be quite a task, so this says just how appalling I found that document, though I abandoned the project due to lack of time or perhaps being tired of this neverending Sappho translation job; oh btw, that evolved into All of Sappho, a now-WIP complete edition of Sappho in Spanish, translations into prose, not poetry, but still]
  1. A buttload of very stupid tiepos which often render the text incomprehensible and make it necessary to reconstruct it to then read it; I wonder if it's mojibake, i.e. if my computer has corrupted the document getting the encoding wrong; [sadly, that wasn't the case: I now have a pdf with (apparently) exactly the same fudgeton of very stupid tiepos, so if it is mojibake, it's on the uploaders' side, not mine; and mojibake cannot account for the horrid line breaking they do at points, so there was certainly at least that error in the print version, and since the pdf is para imprimir (for printing), probably all the rest of the horrid mistakes were there too;]
  2. It says it prefers those who hold back from completing too much, and then contradictorily completes where others do not, taking from Edmonds who in this art is an unscrupulous master, and offering sometimes some interesting solutions as well (see Phíltatŏn Gaíaś gĕnŏś Ŏrránō tĕ [aka Sappho 16]
  3. It translates to verso libre, a choice I do not like too much; indeed I've always conceived poetry as opposed to prose, a bit like Gorgias, “Τὴν ποίησιν ἅπαντα καὶ νομίζω καὶ ὀνομάζω λόγον ἔχοντα μέτρον”, “I believe and name all poetry as a speech having meter”, where the meter can be the most various possible, but must be there, whereas in the verso libre dehw ain't none; there is, however, also another sense of poetic in Italian [actually, this extends to poetry/poem (poesia) in Italian, but not in English, I think, which is why I translated poesia to poetic here], that is something poetic [whoops, there we go :)], with pathos, which however can be done in prose as well, giving way to the possibility of apparently contradictory expressions such as poem in prose or non-poetic poem; this sense can certainly be seen in poems written in verso libre, though not all fragments, IMO, follow this kind of poetry; it may be that the translator cured the sounds and the words in a particular way; or that he wrote verso libre to play cool when he should actually have written "prose"
Before Edmonds, let's talk about Campbell. Campbell proposes to replace Edmonds' Lyra Græca by adding the new discoveries of material, and completing the texts a bit less. This is what it does, with the right critical apparatus and notes on who completed.
Grenfell and Hunt [link is to volume X, there are several volumes and more than one are of use for Sappho, though the most used (and in fact the only one I downloaded back in the day IIRC) is vol X] are a nice source, because they have raw transcriptions of the papyri and notes on the possible readings of dubious letters, when not images of the papyri. It's clear that they cannot be exhaustive on Sappho, because the Oxyrhynchus Papyri are not the only source for Sappho, but in what they have they're of great help.
Now we lastly come to Edmonds. Concerning him, I quote Campbell's preface: «J. M. Edmonds' three volumes of Lyra Graeca have given useful service since their appearance some fifty years ago, but the time has come to replace them. Much new material has been unearthed; and Edmonds' version of the papyrus texts was spoiled by his excessive eagerness to fill the gaps». I think this is a synthetic and correct judgement: this guy really completes too much, though I sometimes follow him. Suffice it to think of that ΑΜΦ [stands for ἈΜετάΦραστον, or UnTransLatable, and refers to one of a long series of fragments I deemed too holey for a poetic translations and just translated into prose in Italian in the Paracritical Note; Edmonds has it as fr. 82 (pp. 238 ss.), whereas in Campbell it is fr. 92, and it is somewhere in book 5 for Bibliotheca Augustana (search for 9722 to find it); the link given is the transcription of the papyrus, the text and translation will appear at The Rest of Sappho as soon as I finish the humongous job that that transcription is] which you can see above [further up in the Note] in Edmonds' text: he justifies himself by saying, in a note, «very tentatively restored by E.; many words even outside the brackets are very doubtfully legible, especially after 1. 9, cf. C.R. 1916. 131 : separation of the strophes uncertain», [and some of those are just not there, but many -- see transcription for details -- are indeed visible if you zoom in like crazy and squint hard as heck,] but no other source reports those letters, so that I placed it among the ΑΜΦ. Then sometimes he cuts pieces away, sometimes he hyper-aeolizes, sometimes he invents things that don't exist, like the dual in the Hymn to Aphrodite (the sparrows) when the dual is only of Attic, or προτί for περί, where anyone reports περί, and so the source had to be thus, or δολόπλοκα for δολόπλοκε, or other things. Anyway in his phantasy he helped me complete certain fragments, so he's been useful

I failed to mention a few sources I had, like aoidoi.org and Rosati, which I probably didn't take that much off of, and perhaps others.

I have a few sources to add now. One is Wharton. Now this is a lot of translations for each poem, and there is no critical apparatus. According to the preface, it should be taken off Bergk, but there is at least one place where that is not true: in the first Sappho poem I posted, I adopted what is, in Wharton's implicit allegation, Bergk's reading, except Bergk has «ὤς σε γὰρ ϝίδω βρόχε', ὤς με φώνας» (or the likes), and not «ὠς γὰρ εὔιδον βροχέως σε, φώνας», like I chose.
Then there is, of course, Bergk, with his wonderful critical notes. Pity it's in Latin and with no translations of the fragments, but a great source nonetheless.
Finally, there is Carson, not available online (ahem, b-ok.org, ahem), who is very prudent in not completing the text, and then proceeds to complete the translation, which is very bad practice, IMHO. I probably won't get much off her, because where no completion is offered, I cannot get anything new, but at most a support for other sources' texts.
Also, I found this thing mentioning a new papyrus published some 3 years ago (somewhere in 2014) which revolutionizes the text of Divine Hera (which will appear in a post titled "Sappho: two divine epiphanies" due Aug 1, 2017 [future me going "What happened? Did I merge posts? It was posted 29/7…"], and throws the reconstruction I had right out the window, alas, my translations are based on a totally wrong text.

Update during checkup:
The papyrus mentioned above is P.GC. inv. 105, which is covered at the papyri transcriptions post thanks to ahem b-ok.org ahem which provided me an image of it, and revolutionized not only Divine Hera, but way more poems, including Cypris and Nereids, which is now "Queen Nereids" (goodbye Cypris), and Sappho 16, which has been split into two poems by now.
I have since also found this Italian anthology, which sparked a whole group in the Rest of Sappho, and this article about P.Sapph. Obbink, another recent papyrus which revolutionised yet another poem, and this critical note, and this article about several mergings of fragments, and even friggin' Voigt, a humongous critical edition of Sappho, Latin and Greek only.
I also bought Lobel-Page on Amazon.
All of those are obviously great sources, since they are serious scholarly works, and I used Voigt and Lobel-Page a lot. In fact, Lobel-Page allowed me to find that ΑΜΦ mentioned above in Campbell by giving me the number. Campbell has this custom of smashing together the lines of particularly holey fragments, which I don't really like because it makes them harder to recognize (especially if you're comparing them to Edmonds' phantasies :) ).

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