House of the Muses

Once edited for content: Sappho’s “Roses of Pieria” speech–not according to proper modern scholars who thought her version was a little raw for a woman of nobility, but translated from the ORIGINAL Greek in the spirit that she originally meant it! This poem is purported to have been said “to an uneducated woman”, but this one poem seems out of character for Sappho to have been so cruel when she was such a beloved poetess otherwise. The modern translation reads calmly, like she mentioned it in passing to someone on the street:

“…But when you die, you will lie there, and afterwards there will never be any recollection of you or any longing for you since you have no share in the Roses of Pieria; unseen in the house of Hades also, flown from our midst, you will go to and fro among the shadowy corpses.”

Pretty mild, huh? This would be snooty and arrogant, and mean of her to say something like this to the “uneducated woman” if the context were true. But this was not a curse meant for a casual enemy. The words that got substituted with “you will go to and fro” were in the Greek dictionary as meaning, “to wander raving, frenzied”. The next to last panel is a little trickier: “eis hysteron” means “into the afterward”, which was the slang of that day, sort of like Alkaios’ “at the back edge of beyond” which has survived to modern times to refer to the back end of Egypt, among other things. So, seeing clearly what Sappho meant, I colloquially placed “ever afterward” there. I had to translate the last panel into Idiomatic English. The original Greek poem ends, “by the shadowy dead quaffed!” But nobody uses the word “quaffed” much anymore–it means to drink copiously, or excessively. So a twist into our modern syntax, and here is the original curse from Sappho, into a translation that even Tony Moore, creator of The Walking Dead, would be proud of.

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