Kathryn H. Stutz (Johns Hopkins University)
This paper serves as an author’s commentary and a creative deconstruction of my recently published project re-translating Sappho’s “Brothers Poem” into the context of Victorian English epistolary, examining both the scholarly sources that I used to craft my poem and the theoretical landscape of poetic and geographic spaces that lie beneath my literary production.
During my process of translation, I engaged with several central scholarly questions about the “Brothers Poem,” including the identification of the poem’s addressee (Kurke, Mueller), and the degree to which the frustration expressed by the poem’s narrator—about the behavior of her brothers Charaxos and Larichos—should be expressed as poetic invective (Martin, Swift). Although the “Brothers Poem” stands as a very recent part of the corpus of Sapphic poetry, several literary translations (Carson, Logan) have already set the standard for which tropes and themes typically appear within English-language versions of this new Sappho. When approaching my own adaptation, therefore, I built upon a framework of these familial relationships and added a third, exterior interlocutor. By translating Sappho’s ancient Greek verses through the perspective of a more chronologically “close-by” historical figure—that is, Mary Ann Hartnell, a young working-class woman living in Victorian England, whose brothers vanished in an ill-fated expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1845 (Beattie and Geiger)—I strove to create a transtemporal space of engagement between the ancient world, the nineteenth century, and the present day. This paper explores this impossible intertextuality: the parallelism between the “new” Sappho of the so-called “Brothers Poem,” (revealed in 2014 amidst questions of papyrological provenance and ethical publication; cf. Sampson and Uhlig), and the epistolary evidence of bereaved British families of the nineteenth century, who had lost sons to dangerous sailing conditions, just as Sappho’s addressee had worried would happen to Sappho’s brother Charaxos more than two thousand years earlier.
For the nineteenth-century Hartnell family, the dangers of the sea became a source of enduring mystery and grief, echoing ancient anxieties about sea-travel as seen within the poems of Sappho, and explored further within Homer’s Odyssey (Grethlein), Hesiod’s Works and Days (Rosen) and Euripides’ Helen (Haussker). Just as the afterlife of Sappho is defined by a type of “perpetual displacement” (Prins), Mary Ann Hartnell’s two lost brothers exist in a liminal cultural space of ‘found’ and yet ‘never found.’ Ultimately, I argue, the act of bringing these two parallel histories together can allow us to traverse new seas, tracing new landscapes of meaning, both as readers and as translators.