Hello everyone and an especial welcome to a small influx of new subscribers who came in between Christmas and New Year. We spent Christmas in Paris and then a wet New Year in Suffolk trying to expose the increasingly French children to as much Genuine British Culture as possible in the space of a week. In practice, that mostly meant the cinema, the huge soft-play in Lowestoft (strangely non-existent in Paris), the arcade at the pier, the freezing beach and the pantomine in Beccles. (Last year, my middle son, in true Eurobrat style, was convinced we had actually been to the pantomime in Brussels, which is amusing if you happen to be familiar with both.) We did also march them round Norwich cathedral and museum on the wettest day of all. English cathedrals today are funny things: Norwich is beautifully kept, and it’s an extraordinary building, but all the paraphernalia of official ‘visiting’, even the many helpful sashed volunteer attendants — many more of them than actual visitors first thing on Tuesday morning in the pouring rain — does oddly make it all seem less accessible somehow, rather than more; less our own space. It’s hard to imagine just wandering in, to light a candle or think for a minute, you’d have to have so many polite and friendly interactions before you made it that far. Our nearest church in Paris, dedicated to the obscure (to me at least) St Médard, still has that appealing shabby-but-used feel of a building which locals stray in and out of on the way to the shops.
I’m particularly (some might say perversely) fond of Lowestoft which is the opposite of a tourist destination but does boast — alongside the soft play and the cinema — a main road across a lifting bridge. The bridge splits in half to open up and let taller ships through from time to time, thereby stopping the traffic completely for ages. On this visit I discovered that it also has a surprisingly good Waterstones: much better than the one in Southwold, which is small and rather lamely trying to pretend that it’s not in fact a Waterstones at all. Decades ago, Southwold used to be a glory hole of junk shops and second hand bookshops, but that’s all long gone in preference for a dreary procession of all the same overpriced clothing chains you find in London. For secondhand books, Westleton is the best NE Suffolk option, since it now boasts both the professional and well-organised newcomer, Barnabee’s Books, and the long-standing Chapel Books. The latter opens randomly at various times: the eccentric owner, sometimes clad in pyjamas and a woolly hat, will offer you a cup of tea and, if you ask nicely, usher you into the back office to inspect the antiquarian books. It’s a blissful instantiation of the ideal second-hand bookshop, though admittedly chilly in winter. We didn’t make it this time but it often has a lot of old editions of the classics, and always a substantial poetry section. Unless someone has bought them in the last year or two it also has a huge run of the Pali Text Society, which might be a top tip for someone, you never know. I can never buy them because we are always either without a car or the car is already completely full of bickering children, buggies and discarded rice cakes, more’s the pity. (Westleton also has a very good pub, a lovely church and a playground with a zip wire.)
Pali is a language closely related to Sanskrit, though generally written in Roman script, and it’s the language of most of the early Buddhist canon. There’s something peculiarly fascinating about two plainly closely related languages which nevertheless developed an entirely different literary style and atmosphere. The poetry of the Pali canon is quite unlike most Sanskrit poetry, even though early versions of many of the metres which became standard in classical Sanskrit can be found in it.
Much of the Pali canon is very old, dating from the first few centuries after the Buddha himself: roughly contemporary, that is, with the core texts of classical Greek literature, and older than Roman literature or the texts of the New Testament. Recently I reviewed Kaveh Akbar’s new Penguin Book of Spiritual Poetry, which includes poems or extracts from the earliest antiquity to today. Several of his best choices are Buddhist poems — Buddhist thought and writing has long been a popular recourse for Westerners seeking the spiritual-but-not-religious — and he includes a translation by Susan Murcott of one of the poems from the Pali canon.1 In my review (which you can read here), I expressed some reservations about Akbar’s inclusion of some fairly random bits of Sappho, as being vogueish rather than appropriate — there’s nothing really ‘spiritual’ about either of them, and the same point can be made about quite a few of the selections. But Sappho is really everywhere in anthologies these days. Even John Carey’s recent 100 Poets: A Little Anthology — a totally different sort of anthology from Akbar’s — has a bit of Sappho. Indeed both Carey and Akbar, for all their differences, made the same decision to represent the whole of ancient Greek literature with just two authors: Sappho and Homer.
This contemporary obsession with Sappho seems strange to me. There are good reasons for professional classicists to be excited about Sappho — there aren’t many ancient poets for whom we are still finding new bits of text, and it’s clear that she was rated extremely highly in antiquity. But almost all of surviving Sappho is fragmentary, and the great majority of these fragments are really tiny bits of verse, some only single words.2 If you have good Greek and an excellent knowledge of Greek metre, you’ll sometimes catch the ghost of a real poem from the more substantial of these fragments, but most of them could — if we’re honest — be by almost any ancient Greek author. There’s just not enough left to judge them as poetry. Only a handful of poems have survived more or less intact, at least enough for a non-specialist reader to really experience them as literature. If you’re going to include in an anthology just a couple of short extracts translated from ancient Greek, I think it would be fairer on readers, and more interesting, to offer them a taste of something they could meaningfully explore further: Sophocles or Pindar, or even Anacreon.3
Sappho is popular with anthologists, of course, because there are not many surviving examples of verse by ancient women, and because she was attracted to women. There aren’t many instances of surviving ancient verse by women, but there aren’t none, either. In fact, the Pali canon contains a whole, extraordinary, book of them: the Therīgāthā, an anthology of poems by early Buddhist therīs, women who had attained a senior status within Buddhism.4 It is the first anthology of women’s literature in the world. To be honest, I find it vastly more interesting than the bits of Sappho we have, and we have it entire. Sappho’s interest in the erotic, and the fact that she writes about a woman’s desire for other women, makes her easy to assimilate to the values and interests of our own time: but Sappho is not writing about gay rights any more than Propertius is a love poet in any meaningful modern sense. There’s a risk that we don’t go to Sappho to be reassured by a fiction of timelessness in our own attitudes.
The songs of the therīs are, by contrast, bracing. They confront aging, disease and death from a specifically female perspective, and head-on. Here is the beginning of a long poem by Ambapali — who had been famously beautiful — which systematically itemises her loss of beauty:
The hairs on my head were once curly, and black like bees.Now age has made them pale like jute: it’s nothing other than to speak the truth.The hair on my head was once scented, a box filled with flowers:Now like a rabbit’s pelt, it reeks with age: it’s nothing other than to speak the truth.It was beautiful, bunched and pinned and lush as a grove:Now meagre, thinned out by age: it’s nothing other than to speak the truth.
I love the image here of a beautiful girl’s curls like black bees: shiny and somewhat soft, but firm and springy too with, perhaps, just the hint of a sting. (Indeed it reminds me of one of my favourite bits of Sappho, fr. 146: μήτε μοι μέλι μήτε μέλισσα; Neither for me the honey nor the bee.)
Ambapali’s poem is in a metre which would later be schematized and described extensively in classical Sanskrit metrics. But as A. K. Warder put it, ‘all of these Pali metres are at the very beginning of their development’ — there’s a feeling of freshness, even improvisation, which one recognises, remotely, from other periods of rapid literary, cultural and religious change, like the writings of the New Testament, or modernism, or the explosion of formal and generic innovation in early modern Europe, in both Latin and the vernacular.5
The therīs sing of female hope, pain and desire only to put all those feelings, even for the grief of a beloved child, firmly in their place. Here is Patachara, who had lost children herself, addressing a group of women who cannot come to terms with their grief:
yassa maggam na jānāsi āgatassa gatassa vātam kuto āgatam sattam mama putto ti rodasi.maggam ca khossa jānāsi āgatassa gatassa vāna nam samanusocesi evam dhammā hi pāņino.ayācito tatāgacchi ananuññāto ito gatokuto pi nūna āgantvā vasitvā katipāhakam.ito pi aññena gato tato apaññena gacchatipeto manussarūpena samsaranto gamissatiyathāgato tathā gato kā tattha paridevanā.
I’ve written out the Pali (though there are one or two diacritics I can’t render here) because even just a quick read through will give you a sense of how often sounds and words are repeated, and how many words rhyme with others. Charles Halliday’s quite expansive English translation runs like this:
You keep crying out, “My son!”to that being who was coming or going somewhere elseand who came from somewhere else,none of which you know.But you do not really cry for himover what you do know will face him wherever he is:that is just human nature.he came from there uninvited, he went from here without permission,he came from somewhere or other, he stayed a bit.From here he went one way, from there he will go another,a hungry ghost will be reborn as a human.He went the way he came, what is there to grieve about?
Halliday is an excellent guide for someone (like me) picking their way through the Pali based largely on a knowledge of Sanskrit, and his expansions help to fill in some of what is implied but not stated directly. But his translations are prosaic and rather sprawling compared to the metrical structure, musicality, intense repetition and alliteration and insistent internal rhyme of the Pali text. At the risk of obscurity, a more syntactically awkward but more literal translation might be a helpful counterpart:
He whose path you do not know, he’s come, or goneHe who came from somewhere as a man:You cry for him “my son”.He whose path you do now know, he’s come, or gone,It’s not him for whom you grieve:It is the way of living things to leave.He came to you unasked and without leave he left;From somewhere he arrivedAnd stayed a little while.Leaving by one path, he goes on by anotherDead as he is he continues his migration:So he’s come, so he’s gone:Why then grieve for anyone?
Like many of the poems in the Therīgāthā, the poem can be explicated in some depth in relation to Buddhist teaching, but even if you know nothing of that its challenge remains robust and direct. Are we right to grieve, and how much? We might think of Horace reproaching Virgil for excessive grief, or Ben Jonson’s much anthologised poem for his son, who had died aged 7, with its difficult and ultimately only partially convincing argument. As often in Jonson, what is most moving is our sense that his attempts at virtue — here a Christian acceptance of loss — are rarely entirely successful:
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.O, could I lose all father now! For whyWill man lament the state he should envy?To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,And if no other misery, yet age?Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lieBen Jonson his best piece of poetry."For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,As what he loves may never like too much.
Though this is not immediately obvious, since the book unforgivably never says what language anything is translated from. The horror!
We have about 650 lines of Sappho, out of an original total that might have been somewhere around 10,000. 650 sounds like quite a lot — perhaps a decent number of medium-length poems and even 50 or so short ones. But in practice the great majority are small fragments, preserved by quotation in other later works, and some are single words. Anyone interested in exploring further should look at the wonderful Digital Sappho resource.
Though the very fragmentariness of Sappho has consistently been a spur to creative translation and imitation. Of recent examples, the most striking are the versions by Anne Carson, two of which are used by Akbar in his anthology.
Happily there’s an excellent and affordable edition of the Therīgāthā by Charles Halliday in parallel text with an English translation, brief notes and a useful introduction, part of the (very sadly discontinued) Murty Classical Library of India series. Halliday’s is the edition you want if you’d like to see the original text as well. For readable translations with more explanation and contextualisation than Halliday’s versions, you might want to get hold of a copy of Susan Murcott, First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening (Parallax Press, 1991 and 2006). Murcott includes most (but not all) of the pieces in the Therīgāthā.
The reference work on Pali metre remains A. K. Warder’s very readable 1967 Pali Metre. A Contribution to the History of Indian Literature, which has been reprinted quite recently and is fairly easily available.
I second your points about the wonders of Westleton (both lovely shops) and the decline of Southwold..
Not the main topic here, I realise (which was fascinating), but I have a tip for Norwich cathedral visitors wanting to go straight in and dodge the volunteers: enter via the cloisters at the side...