Sappho, the greatest Lyric Poet the world has ever produced, was born in the ancient Greek island of Lesbos in the 7th Century
B.C. She was so
important a personality of antiquity that Legendary figures of all times like Plato, Aristotle,Aristophanes, Longinus, Catullus, Horace, Solon, Cicero,Christine de Pizan, Ludovico Aristo, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Ossur, Alessandro Verri, Giovanni Pacini, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Daudet, Lamartine, Rilke, Wharton, Ezra Pound, Amy lowel, Sylvia Plath and many more had not only adored and admired her, but had been greatly influenced by her work. Plato called her The Tenth Muse. The only human being painted by the great Artist Rafael happens to be Sappho.In contrast to the epic form mastered by Homer, She was instrumental in starting the Lyric poetry movement along with Alcaeus etc., in which the poems were strictly of a personal nature dealing with the pleasure, pain, suffering and other personal feelings and sensibilities of human beings. She always composed poems from the angle of a woman. Many of her poems are suggestive of a homo-erotic relation between women, which was a completely normal practice in ancient Greece. According to rhyme and meter, her complete works had been divided into nine parts and had been kept in the Great Alexandria Library. With the passage of time almost all her works slipped into the oblivion of time. It is said that the Religious heads at that time were unhappy with her works due to the subject matter, and therefore destroyed the same. Although she was a poet/singer, her activities were not only confined to Literature. She has contributed to the cause of Art, Music, and important modern concepts like Feminism and Gender Studies. She wrote from the angle of a woman in a male dominated Society.Her portrayal of Helen in her works is completely different from Homer and other important male writers. According to her, she was not the passive object of love or lust, rather she actively wanted her desire to be fulfilled, for which she came with paris to Troy leaving her husband, children and family.It is a crude irony of fate that out of her massive poetic works,only one complete poem survives. Others are in the form of
fragments.
It is very interesting to note that she was virtually resurrected from the gloomy oblivion by the researchers and scholars who recovered and deciphered her poems from innumerable fragments of papyrus which were initially discovered by the peasants of Egypt at Oxhyrinchus. The paintings of Sappho made by eminent artists like Mengin, Alma Tadema, David, Moreu, Dannekker, Chasseriau, Barrias etc. are considered to be masterpieces of Art. her Statue erected in Korea in 1925, and paintings by Seitz in 1964 and that of Engelman in 1997 prove the immortality of Sappho. Some of the stanzas of her poem speak of nothing other than the eternal truth. In one of her poems she says that she would be definiteny remembered for her works in the posterity. In another she describes the nature of Love. According to her, if Love is true, then the Gods can not tamper with it, but a single wrong utterance or glance may destroy it . She is believed to be associated with the cult of Aphrodite and always had a circle of young girls who were sent to her for training in song, music, dance etc. so that they could mature into responsible members of the cultured Greek Society. her complete poem is "Hymn to Aphrodite" in which she pleads for the support of the Goddess in getting back the girl she loved tenderly. She occupies a central position in Feminism and Womens' Studies, and has been projected as a key figure by the gay and lesbialn activists.
The book deals with the life and works of Sappho and has been written in Oriya language, an important branch of the Indo European group of Languages.It conins translation of more than fifty poems of Sappho from eminent authors who have translated her works into English. It has been published by ORIENTAL ACADEMY OF ARTS & LETTERS. The introduction of the Book has been written by Dr. Christina Clark, the eminent scholar of Classical and Near Eastern Studies.