The Lesbian Lyre

The Lesbian Lyre PDF Author: Jeffrey M. Duban
Publisher: CLAIRVIEW BOOKS
ISBN: 1905570805
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 832

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hailed by Plato as the “Tenth Muse” of ancient Greek poetry, Sappho is inarguably antiquity’s greatest lyric poet. Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, and writing amorously of women and men alike, she is the namesake lesbian. What’s left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary. Shrouded in mystery, she is nonetheless repeatedly translated and discussed – no, appropriated – by all. Sappho has most recently undergone a variety of treatments by agenda-driven scholars and so-called poet-translators with little or no knowledge of Greek. Classicist-translator Jeffrey Duban debunks the postmodernist scholarship by which Sappho is interpreted today and offers translations reflecting the charm and elegant simplicity of the originals. Duban provides a reader-friendly overview of Sappho’s times and themes, exploring her eroticism and Greek homosexuality overall. He introduces us to Sappho’s highly cultured island home, to its lyre-accompanied musical legends, and to the fabled beauty of Lesbian women. Not least, he emphasizes the proximity of Lesbos to Troy, making the translation and enjoyment of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey a further focus. More than anything else, argues Duban, it is free verse and its rampant legacy – and no two persons more than Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound – that bear responsibility for the ruin of today’s classics in translation, to say nothing of poetry in the twentieth century. Beyond matters of reflection for classicists, Duban provides a far-ranging beginner’s guide to classical literature, with forays into Spenser and Milton, and into the colonial impulse of Virgil, Spenser, and the West at large.

The Lesbian Lyre

The Lesbian Lyre PDF Author: Jeffrey M. Duban
Publisher: CLAIRVIEW BOOKS
ISBN: 1905570805
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 832

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hailed by Plato as the “Tenth Muse” of ancient Greek poetry, Sappho is inarguably antiquity’s greatest lyric poet. Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, and writing amorously of women and men alike, she is the namesake lesbian. What’s left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary. Shrouded in mystery, she is nonetheless repeatedly translated and discussed – no, appropriated – by all. Sappho has most recently undergone a variety of treatments by agenda-driven scholars and so-called poet-translators with little or no knowledge of Greek. Classicist-translator Jeffrey Duban debunks the postmodernist scholarship by which Sappho is interpreted today and offers translations reflecting the charm and elegant simplicity of the originals. Duban provides a reader-friendly overview of Sappho’s times and themes, exploring her eroticism and Greek homosexuality overall. He introduces us to Sappho’s highly cultured island home, to its lyre-accompanied musical legends, and to the fabled beauty of Lesbian women. Not least, he emphasizes the proximity of Lesbos to Troy, making the translation and enjoyment of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey a further focus. More than anything else, argues Duban, it is free verse and its rampant legacy – and no two persons more than Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound – that bear responsibility for the ruin of today’s classics in translation, to say nothing of poetry in the twentieth century. Beyond matters of reflection for classicists, Duban provides a far-ranging beginner’s guide to classical literature, with forays into Spenser and Milton, and into the colonial impulse of Virgil, Spenser, and the West at large.

7. Orpheus, O Orpheus, gently touch thy Lesbian lyre Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, vol. 121

7. Orpheus, O Orpheus, gently touch thy Lesbian lyre Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, vol. 121 PDF Author: Gordon Callon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho

Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho PDF Author: Jane McIntosh Snyder
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231099950
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
The lyrics of Sappho are the earliest surviving examples of explicitly homoerotic literature and have often been analyzed in terms of their revelations about the island society of Lesbos. This volume examines Sappho's poetry through the lens of lesbian desire. It focuses on the active female gaze in the texts and the narrative voice - one that describes female experience and desires as primary, not secondary to the dominant (male) culture.

The Key To Everything

The Key To Everything PDF Author: Gerry Pearlberg
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312118426
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 104

Get Book Here

Book Description
The powerful selection of forty-four classic lesbian love poems in this collection by no means adheres to the simple "love poem" formula. A broad range of moods and experiences is presented here-celebratory, erotic, passionate, humorous, tender, and wry. The diversity of voices represented in this volume provides constant suprises-forty-four nuanced, singular treatments of this age-old theme from a lesbian perspective.

The Other Sappho

The Other Sappho PDF Author: Ellen Frye
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Obscure Greek folklore inspires this novel about a young lesbian slave named Lykaina ("wolf-woman''). After her mistress instructs her to seek out the elegant Sappho and her famous school of poetry, Lykaina undertakes her own small odyssey from Sparta to the celebrated island of Lesbos. En route she meets Maia, a travel companion extraordinaire who initiates her into the worship of the Earth Mother. Once in Sappho's home, Lykaina thrives: "This is a palace of love. . . . This is a land of poetry. Here I belong.'' Eventually, however, she leaves the court, offended by the other poets' disdain for the less privileged. Lykaina returns to Maia, who urges her to recite for the country people so close to her heart. With Maia's patronage, the "other Sappho'' evolves her own school of poetry. From descriptions of markets and clothing to expositions of women's love affairs and the art of verse, Frye (The Marble Threshing Floor: A Collection of Greek Folk Songs ) shores up her imaginings with persuasive research. "--Goodreads

The Shipwreck Sea

The Shipwreck Sea PDF Author: Jeffrey M. Duban
Publisher: CLAIRVIEW BOOKS
ISBN: 1912992000
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sappho, in the words of poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), was “simply nothing less – as she is certainly nothing more – than the greatest poet who ever was at all.” Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho, the namesake lesbian, wrote amorously of men and women alike, exhibiting both masculine and feminine tendencies in her poetry and life. What’s left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary, and thus ever subject to speculation and study. The Shipwreck Sea highlights the love poetry of the soulful Sappho, the impassioned Ibycus, and the playful Anacreon, among other Greek lyric poets of the age (7th to 5th centuries BC), with verse translations into English by author Jeffrey Duban. The book also features selected Latin poets who wrote on erotic themes – Catullus, Lucretius, Horace, and Petronius – and poems by Charles Baudelaire, with his milestone rejoinder to lesbian love (“Lesbos”) and, in the same stanzaic meter, a turn to the consoling power of memory in love’s more frequently tormented recall (“Le Balcon”). Duban also translates selected Carmina Burana of Carl Orff, the poems frequently Anacreontic in spirit. The book’s essays include a comprehensive analysis with a new translation of Horace’s famed Odes 1.5 (“To Pyrrha”), in which the theme of (love’s) shipwreck predominates, and an opening treatise-length argument – exploring painting, sculpture, literature, and other Western art forms – on the irrelevance of gender to artistic creation. (No, Homer was not a woman, and it would make no difference if she were.) Twenty full-color artwork reproductions, masterpieces in their own right, illustrate and bring Duban’s argument to life. Finally, Duban presents a selection of his own love poems, imitations and pastiches written over a lifetime – these composed in the “classical mode”, which is the leitmotif of this volume. The Shipwreck Sea is a delightful and continually thought-provoking companion to The Lesbian Lyre, both books vividly demonstrating that classicism yet thrives in our time, despite the modernism marshaled against it.

Sappho's Lyre

Sappho's Lyre PDF Author: Diane J. Rayor
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520910966
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sappho sang her poetry to the accompaniment of the lyre on the Greek island of Lesbos over 2500 years ago. Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets—the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time. Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including "new" Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers. Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.

Sappho

Sappho PDF Author: Nancy Freedman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312186606
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this finely drawn portrait, Sappho of Lesbos narrates her extraordinary life, from her childhood in war-torn Mitylene to her later relentless search for passionate love. Driven by the all-consuming fever of her Muse-inspired poetic gift, Sappho leads the reader on a journey that is at once turbulent and divine, desperate and sensuous. With breathtaking lucidity and great leaps of imagination, Nancy Freedman shows us a Sappho we have never known -- and one we will never forget. The toast of kings for her verse, Sappho was also a shrewd businesswoman, an educator, an advocate of women's equality, and a rebel who was banished from her island home. Remembering her solely as a lesbian icon reveals only one aspect of her multifaceted personality. Here, finally, Nancy Freedman gives us the complete Sappho. She was arguably the most accomplished lyric poet of the ancient world, but her writing was all but destroyed by the early Church. Only in this century have fragments been uncovered, so that we too may glimpse the force of this strangely enigmatic woman. Contradictory in nature, she inspired equally passionate adoration and loathing; her fame brought her a series of obsessive loves. Her relations with women are well known, but it was for the love of a man that she set sail to face her destiny.

If Not, Winter

If Not, Winter PDF Author: Sappho
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307556980
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
By combining the ancient mysteries of Sappho with the contemporary wizardry of one of our most fearless and original poets, If Not, Winter provides a tantalizing window onto the genius of a woman whose lyric power spans millennia. Of the nine books of lyrics the ancient Greek poet Sappho is said to have composed, only one poem has survived complete. The rest are fragments. In this miraculous new translation, acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson presents all of Sappho’s fragments, in Greek and in English, as if on the ragged scraps of papyrus that preserve them, inviting a thrill of discovery and conjecture that can be described only as electric—or, to use Sappho’s words, as “thin fire . . . racing under skin.” "Sappho's verse has been elevated to new heights in [this] gorgeous translation." --The New York Times "Carson is in many ways [Sappho's] ideal translator....Her command of language is hones to a perfect edge and her approach to the text, respectful yet imaginative, results in verse that lets Sappho shine forth." --Los Angeles Times

My Lover Is a Woman

My Lover Is a Woman PDF Author: Leslea Newman
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345421140
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Editor Lesléa Newman has collected the work of both well-known and emerging poets to create an anthology of some of the finest writers of any gender or sexual orientation writing poetry today. The probing fierceness of Adrienne Rich's "Love Poem," the stirring sensual incantation of Ellen Bass's "Praise," the intensely felt tenderness of Dorothy Allison's "Reason Enough to Love You," are just a few examples of the rich talent displayed in this volume. These poets have written daring confessions of love, sorrow, anger, and joy. Each poem is an elaborate confirmation of the resilience of the human spirit, and the ability to transform experience--including the struggle against the societal taboo of same-sex love--into brilliant poetry.