CHAPTER 2

The Poets’ Muse

In the middle of the nineteenth century, poets, dramatists, and prose writers rediscovered Sappho. “Lesbos,” Baudelaire’s poem, was published in an anthology in 1850, and in the same year, Philoxène Boyer’s Sappho was performed at the Odéon theater in Paris.1 After this performance, Théodore de Banville declared with alarm: “This name Sappho is leaping off everyone’s lips. Why is the Muse of Mitylene haunting our sleepless nights?”2 LES FLEURS DU MAL /  THE FLOWERS OF EVIL

The truly Decadent saga of the Greek poet began with the publication of Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, which Baudelaire had initially—as early as 1845—intended to call “The Lesbians.” “Lesbos,” at the beginning of the section “Femmes damnées,” depicted Sappho as an advocate of sapphism, but also as a hypocrite who succumbed to heterosexual love.3 No doubt Baudelaire hoped to avoid the wrath of the censor by associating the lesbian with the prestigious Sappho and with a vague vision of antiquity. Although the figure of the lesbian embodied the modern heroine for him, she remained still tightly anchored in Greek mythology dominated by Sappho and thereby preserved within the loosely defined spatiotemporal frame of mythic narratives.4 Nevertheless, it was precisely this association that caused the scandal and provoked the ire of the prosecutor.5 Baudelaire depicted Sappho as a character of the remote past and made her an inaccessible goddess. His heroine is the rival of Venus in beauty as much as in the realm of love — a love that attracted the Phrynes to each other—but this fin-de-siècle Venus succumbs voluntarily to sapphism. She is also equated with Orpheus, since he waited for “the indulgent and good sea” to bring back not the head of “the mythic bard” but “the adored body of Sappho.”6 In the end, Baudelaire awarded himself the status of the double of the Tenth Muse and bragged about his role as the sole heir of lesbian secrets.

Albert, Nicole G., Lesbian Decadence: Representations in art and literature of fin-de-siècle France DOI: dx.doi.org/10.17312/harringtonparkpress/2016.01.ld.002 © Harrington Park Press, LLC, New York, NY 10011

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For Lesbos has chosen me among all men to sing the secrets of her budding grove; from childhood I have shared the mystery of frenzied laughter laced with sullen tears, and therefore am I chosen among men.7 In declaring himself the chosen poet, the intermediary, even the sapphic poet, Baudelaire superimposed himself on Sappho in such a way that he succeeded in erasing her from the text—just as he eliminated her from the title—because of her own blasphemy. His approach, as unusual as it may seem, revolved around a question that futureww translators of the lyrical poetess of antiquity would have to answer: Is the poet Sappho’s double? Or is Sappho simply a precursor of the poet? Ten years after Baudelaire’s verses were published, in 1867, Verlaine, unlike Baudelaire—who put Sappho at the beginning, namely, at the origin of sapphism—ended the cycle of poems called “Les Amies”/  “The Girlfriends,” which was subtitled “Scènes d’amour saphique” /  “Scenes of Sapphic Love,” with a sonnet dedicated to Sappho, “the forgetful goddess of the Rite.”8 To underline the point, Verlaine inverted the traditional order of the stanzas (3/3/4/4). In his version, the Baudelairian goddess becomes a carnal figure surrounded by various perverse “schoolgirls.”9 This collection of overtly erotic verse in the libertine tradition provoked the censors’ wrath, and they ordered its destruction, even though it did not retain the seditious dimension of Baudelaire’s sapphic pieces.10 SWINBURNE’S DESTRUCTIVE PASSION

An admirer of Baudelaire, Swinburne, whom Guy de Maupassant considered one of the last “poets enamored of an inaccessible sensual pleasure,”11 was already famous when he published a collection of poems in 1866 with the inoffensive title Poems and Ballads; it was translated into French twenty-five years later and became the hallmark of decadence in France.12 In it he included a personal—to say the least—translation of “The Ode to Aphrodite” and “The Ode to a Beloved,” which he respectively renamed “Sapphics” and “Anactoria.” The publication of these two poems ignited a firestorm of public

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criticism. Swinburne’s portrayal of Sappho was subjected to so much criticism that he decided to publish a short pamphlet to defend himself in the same year. Because he had been taught as a schoolboy “to learn, to construe, and to repeat . . . the imperishable and incomparable verses of that supreme poet,” he declared that he had wanted to translate them “into a baser and later language.” He added that he took the liberty of superimposing his voice onto Sappho’s in order to reanimate the poems:“I have striven to cast my spirit into the mold of hers, to express and represent not the poem but the poet. I did not think it requisite to disfigure the page with a footnote wherever I had fallen back upon the original text.”13 Giving free rein to his imagination, in “Anactoria” the poet embraced the unbridled passion of Sappho for her lover.14 His purpose, he explained, was less to translate than to restore the spirit of the original poem and, in particular, to restore “that violence of affection between one and another which hardens into rage and deepens into despair.”15 Challenged by prudish critics to justify this “mere deification of incontinence,”16 he responded to the accusations of blasphemy and obscenity with terms reminiscent of the defense used in the trial over Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal /  The Flowers of Evil: “What is there now of horrible in this? The expressions of fierce fondness, the ardors of passionate despair? Are these so unnatural as to affright or disgust? Where is there an unclean detail? Where an obscene allusion?”17 Swinburne abandoned the versification of his model, Sappho, and opted for a long succession of decasyllables in order to be more faithful to “the spirit of a poem, whose form could not be reproduced in the body.”18 His “ode” is more than three hundred verses long, whereas the original fragment is only seventeen. If he freed himself from the sapphic stanza and chose this diluted and extended form, he did so to liberate her from all moral shackles. A fervent admirer of the “Divine Marquis” (de Sade), he abandoned the reserve with which Sappho sought to analyze her torments in order to make the muse-lover a figure directly descended from his reading. Analyzing the different stages of hopeless love, his poem unites an ascending slope with a descending one in a way that the critic David A. Cook associates with the sexual act in its “orgasmic pattern of tumescence and detumescence.”19 The vocabulary,

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the rhythm, and the images constitute an authentic poetic program. From the first stanza, the tone is set: “My life is bitter with thy love.”20 After a series of cruel acts and brutality, Sappho and Anactoria cannot relate to each other except through suffering: a cerebral kind for Sappho (“all thy beauty sickens me with love”)21 and a physical kind for the victim, including agonizing pain (“that from face to feet /  Thy body were abolished and consumed /  And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed”).22 Sappho’s words torment the entire universe through their evocative power: “flamelike foam,” “disastrous stars,” “labouring moans”23—all express the disturbance of nature, mirroring the interior struggles of the “heroine.” The musician-lover metamorphoses into a bacchante who extends her desire for destruction to the entire world that surrounds her. Having broken the heart and soul of Anactoria, she wants to dissolve into the Great Void: “I, Sappho, shall be one with all these things /  With all high things for ever.”24 This wish for annihilation is for Swinburne the way to reveal his actual intention: to appropriate the essence of Sappho’s words in order to kill her. The poem cannot be reduced to a portrait of morbid and destructive passion. It is also a reflection on art, since, through Sappho’s voice, Swinburne turns the body into a musical device:“Thy body is the song /  Thy mouth the music.”25 Anactoria is no more than an instrument in the hands of the poetess at the mercy of her “fury of expression.”26 Would I not hurt thee perfectly? . . . Strike pang from pang as note is struck from note Catch the sob’s middle music in thy throat, Take thy limbs living, and new-mould with these A lyre of many faultless agonies?27 For Sappho, who sought to bend her words to her will, her silent lover is the source of a still-amorphous inspiration that the poetic exercise is going to allow her to shape.This intended victory, however, will not take place. Sappho aspires to nothingness: she has no prospect other than suicide, as if Swinburne must immolate his idol at the end of the poem to achieve the status of poet. What began as a glorification of the ode by Sappho led to its disintegration, just as the

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original work had decayed into fragments. Here again, it seems that remembering Sappho necessarily means dismembering her work. In “The Ode to Aphrodite,” renamed “Sapphics,” Swinburne was inspired by the song in which Sappho calls on the goddess to come down from Olympus and bring her indifferent lover back to her.28 Here again, his adaptation is longer than the original text (twenty stanzas compared to seven), but this time he preserves the sapphic stanza, which, by its brevity, gives a sense of incompleteness. Significantly, he recast the poem’s structure, substituting himself for the Greek poetess and seeing himself as “the white implacable Aphrodite,” who arrives on the isle of Lesbos.29 The goddess is followed by Apollo, the Four Graces, and the Nine Muses. The Tenth Muse disturbs this Olympian scene by singing a hymn that evokes “wonderful things they [her fellow sisters] knew not.” And transfixed by the emotion that renders her “white as dead snow, paler than grass in summer,” Sappho casts a spell on the goddess of love with her sublime song dedicated to the beloved virgins.30 The sapphic verse is supposed to imitate the particular rhythm of the original ode, but Swinburne did not convey the poetess’s words; it is only through the effect that they produce on the audience that the content can be deciphered. “Sapphics” ends with the departure of Aphrodite, the Graces, and the Muses. Abandoned by its protective spirits, weighed down by the fallen souls of the damned women, the island of Lesbos resonates with almost inaudible wailings, similar to the distorted echo of the lost work that concludes the poem: All withdrew long since, and the land was barren, Full of fruitless women and music only. Now perchance, when winds are assuaged at sunset, Lulled at the dewfall By the grey-side, unassuaged, unheard of, Unbeloved, unseen in the ebb of twilight, Ghosts of outcast women return lamenting, Purged not in Lethe, Clothed about with flame and with tears and singing Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven, Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity, Hearing, to hear them.31 26

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Following the path marked out by Baudelaire, Swinburne rooted Sappho in a new poetic consciousness,all the while constructing a mythology of sapphism, which found its inspiration in the double meaning of the title:“Sapphics” designated poetry and lesbians at the same time. Almost fifteen years later, Swinburne made a more discreet homage to Sappho’s work in “On the Cliffs,” a poem published in a short collection entitled Songs of the Springtides (1880). This poem had a verse in Greek by Sappho the Immortal as an epigraph. Swinburne embellished “On the Cliffs” with sapphic fragments printed in italics, and he gradually introduced changes as if he were trying to be as faithful as possible to the original text, or presenting a translation in progress. For the same reasons, he gave pride of place to juxtapositions and nominal clauses and did not fill in gaps. A kind of meta-poetic enterprise, this poem broke completely with the classic ideal. The iconoclastic translator thus painted a portrait of Sappho who is as much a lover as a poetess, two chiasmic aspects that were already inseparable for Baudelaire: “Love’s priestess, mad with pain and joy of song /  Song’s priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.”32 He made Sappho his poetic soul sister and declared: “As brother and sister were we, child and bird, /  Since thy first Lesbian word /  Flamed on me.”33 Swinburne claimed that “great poets are bisexual, male and female at once.”34 Who better than Sappho to incarnate the hermaphrodite to whom he dedicated a poem with the title “Hermaphroditus”? It was also because of his intimate relationship to sapphic poetry, however, that he could celebrate the encounter between voices and sexes.35 This complicity revealed as much humility as pride in the Victorian poet who proclaimed his perfection by intermingling his song with that of Sappho—a fundamentally lesbian Sappho—since he saw poetry and homosexuality as indivisible. This provocative equation would be diversely tackled toward the end of the nineteenth century. A LICENTIOUS PASTICHE

The renewal of interest in Sappho is inseparable from the vogue for antiquity that reached a high point in the 1890s. Through its lifestyle and its diffuse eroticism, this antiquity from a vaguely defined The Poets’ Muse

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past suited the spirit of the times. Pierre Louÿs was the leader of this neo-Hellenism. In his case, it was due to his solid understanding of Greece’s literary heritage, and he earned praise from literary critics for it. As a reviewer in the Mercure de France declared, Louÿs was “probably the only author currently alive who has come closest to reviving the Greek spirit in what it contains of its most seductive and most mysterious qualities.”36 In January 1895 Louÿs published Les Chansons de Bilitis /  The Songs of Bilitis with the byline “translated from the ancient Greek for the first time by P. L.” It was “a simple title and a subtle conceit for those who knew that Bilitis had never existed.”37 The writer presented himself as the humble translator of what actually was a very successful—and original—pastiche that parodied the philological craze for Sappho of that time.38 To allay concerns about its authenticity, Louÿs supplemented the first edition with notes on Bilitis’s lexicon and on the supposed work being done by a certain Dr. Heim on the discovery of her tomb.39 The second edition, published in 1898, even included a fictitious bibliography of various translations of Les Chansons de Bilitis /  The Songs of Bilitis.40 Like André Lebey, who published his work Les Poésies de Sappho /  The Poetry of Sappho the same year, Louÿs preceded his translation with a fake scholarly introduction, in which he recounted the fictitious “Life of Bilitis.” He also described how these poems were discovered in the poetess’s sepulcher, specifically “at Palaeo-Limisso, along an ancient road, not far from the ruins of Amathonte.” “The tomb is underground. . . . Dr. Heim entered it through a narrow shaft that had been covered by dirt, at the end of which he encountered a walled-up entranceway that he had to break down. The wide, low-ceilinged cavern . . . had four walls covered with black amphibolite on which all the poems that the reader will read in this book were engraved in primitive letters, along with the three epitaphs that decorated the sarcophagus.”41 In this book, destined to cause a sensation, Louÿs made his heroine into an imitator, almost a double, of the Tenth Muse.42 Also, Sappho appears under the name Psappha in the second part of the work, “Élégies à Mytilène” /  “Elegies to Mytilene,” which includes Bilitis’s sapphic poems. The second poem underlines the carnal but fleeting bond between the great poetess and the young disciple,

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as Bilitis, shortly after arriving on Lesbos, sleeps with Sappho and, when she awakes, gazes at the strange face of her seducer, who is but a sleeping figure at the end of the poem.43 Sappho is only a secondary character here, but her role is no less decisive in Bilitis’s sexual and poetic vocation. Louÿs spiced up his poems with scenes of amorous intimacy.This sapphic inspiration is most noticeable in the portrait of Atthis and Gyrinno, Sappho’s companions. In “L’Amour” /  “Love,” he drew inspiration directly from Sappho’s “Ode to the Beloved”: “Alas, if I think of her, my throat dries up, my head hangs low, my bosom hardens and causes me pain, I tremble and I cry while walking. . . . Everything that she says to me makes me feel wounded. Her love is a torture. And passersby hear my complaints. . . . Alas, how can I call her my Beloved?”44 In the hands of this expert Hellenist, the writing came close to reviving Sappho’s poetic style.The archaic expressions reinforce the hoax by suggesting a shared influence for the two poetesses. For instance, at the beginning of “Élégies à Mytilène,” Louÿs inscribed an epigraph in Greek in which Sappho mentions Mnasidika and calls her Bilitis’s lover and muse.45 The pastiche was more obvious in the first edition of Les Chansons de Bilitis /  The Songs of Bilitis, which included an excerpt—in English—from Swinburne’s “Anactoria”! Louÿs thus anchored his heroine in exegeses of classical literature and embedded her facetiously in the burgeoning tradition of other more or less contemporary adaptations. Four verses by André Chénier, on which he commented, introduced the story of “a life a bit removed from everyday morality”;46 he quoted Ernest Renan in a long paragraph at the beginning of the poem “Épigrammes dans l’île de Chypre” /  “Epigrams on the Isle of Cyprus” and cited John Keats in the epigraph for “Tombeau de Bilitis” /  “The Tomb of Bilitis,” which is the final section of the book. Louÿs made another change in the second edition for personal reasons. He had dedicated the original edition to André Gide, with whom he was very close, but after they became estranged in 1895, he changed the dedication to the following: “This little book of love in antiquity is dedicated respectfully to the young ladies of the future.” Natalie Clifford Barney, who was one of these “young ladies,” was on friendly terms with Louÿs, even though he was more interested in “Latin games and Greek pleasures” than in “femmes damnées.”47

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Later, Bilitis’s creator gave two luxury editions with personal dedications to Natalie Clifford Barney and her lover Renée Vivien.48 RENÉE VIVIEN: A NEW SAPPHO

Forty years after Swinburne published his controversial “Sapphics,” Renée Vivien explored the concept of artistic creativity and reread Sappho’s poetry from a new, overtly homosexual perspective. Swinburne had adapted the poetry without translating it, and Louÿs brought Sappho back to life in fiction, but Vivien’s approach was different. Without being a Hellenist or a professional philologist, she was the first to produce a comprehensive and entirely new translation of Sappho’s poetry, which remains, even today, one of the most original. Born in London in 1877, Pauline Tarn, who wrote under the pseudonym Renée Vivien, came to Paris at the age of twenty-one. Thanks to a cosmopolitan education, she spoke French fluently. Initiated into sapphic love during her adolescence, she became one of the most well-known figures of Paris-Lesbos at the turn of the last century. In 1899 she met the American Natalie Clifford Barney, who would later be nicknamed the Amazon by Remy de Gourmont. Barney was an heiress, an aesthete keenly interested in literature, and a self-proclaimed lesbian. In the following year, the two became lovers.49 This stormy relationship lasted for two years and was punctuated by numerous breakups and failed reconciliations. Meanwhile, Vivien began a lasting relationship with Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt, whom she had met in 1901 and with whom she wrote books under the joint pseudonym Paule Riversdale.50 During her short life as a valetudinarian—she died of consumption (and possibly of alcoholism as well) in 1909—Vivien lived in a milieu of women writers, actresses, aristocrats, and heiresses, in a circle where sapphism was expressed quite openly. She wrote several collections of poems focused on the Beloved Woman–Friend, an abstract entity who took on all the aspects of a love marred by failure, deception, and suffering. These themes were already prominent in Sappho’s work. Vivien was only twenty-four when she published her first collection, Études et préludes / Studies and Preludes, under the name R.

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Vivien, a pseudonym that concealed her gender. To immerse herself in the literature and life of the poetess of antiquity, she then decided, with fierce determination, to study ancient Greek with her friend the Hellenist Jean Charles-Brun, who was himself a minor poet. They collaborated closely on a translation of Sappho’s poetry. By the end of the year, Vivien was apparently already able to read the poems in their original language. In January 1903 she published Evocations, and then, at the beginning of March, under the pseudonym Renée Vivien—her pen name spelled out for the first time—Sapho:Traduction nouvelle avec le texte grec /  Sappho: A New Translation with the Greek Text.51 André Lebey, who had published his own translation eight years earlier, began protesting even before the book came out, and this prompted her editor to rewrite the advance notice sent to critics in order to anticipate any objection: The work of Sappho, the great Dorian poetess, is not accessible to the French public today. M. Lebey’s translation is out of print. Renée Vivien, whose volumes of verse are all suffused with Hellenic grace, certainly seems qualified for the task; she has given us an edition that pays close attention to the text, an exact and elegant transcription that brings together all the extant, very rare fragments of the Bard of Lesbos. Some verse imitations in French or English, along with commentaries from classic grammarians and authoritative references complete this important effort, which will receive such an excellent welcome from literary experts.52 Vivien’s translation was definitely ambitious. Preceded by a preface and a “biography of Psappha,” her edition included almost fifty poems (or 275 lines). Among them were, of course, “The Ode to Aphrodite” and “The Ode to a Beloved,” but the collection left out the fragments translated by Reinach the year before. When it was published, this 150-page book printed on beautiful, thick paper looked impressive.Vivien continued her philological work with Les Kitharèdes:Traduction nouvelle avec le texte grec /  The Kitharedes: A New Translation with the Greek Text (1904), a collection of poems in verse and in prose that brought together the work of fourteen Hellenic

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poetesses who were Sappho’s disciples and contemporaries. This included imaginative portraits of the Kitharedes by the Symbolist painter Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, which were based on Vivien’s women friends. This artist—the only one with whom the modern poetess ever agreed to work—had already illustrated the blue-tinted cover of Sapho (1903), on which the bard of antiquity has the features of a dark-skinned beauty with glowing eyes (fig. 2.1).53 Vivien took special care with the layout. In Sapho, the poetess’s fragments and odes are reproduced in Greek, accompanied by a translation in prose that tries to give a literal translation of each line, which is usually followed by a poetic adaptation that replicates the sapphic strophe in an attempt to bring out the musicality of the Greek verse. In several places Vivien included excerpts from other poets’ adaptations, both classic and modern ones and, in particular, those of Swinburne, which she knew well. And like Henry Thornton Wharton in 1885, she mentioned several translations and citations for the same fragment. The different languages—Greek, French, English, and, more rarely, Latin—mix together around each fragment, which is framed by floral and ornamental insets of different sizes that lighten the page presentation but sometimes give it a distracting, collage-like appearance (fig. 2.2). Here and there Vivien proposed two versions when the original text was unclear. For instance, the reader has to decide whether it is “certainly I slept in a dream with the daughter of Kupros” or “certainly I spoke in a dream with the daughter of Kupros.”54 With the same concern for precision, she added commentaries on the meaning of a word or the origin of a verse. Thus,Vivien tried to demonstrate the seriousness and the impartiality of her translation, even if it resembles a work in progress that the rigid format of a book cannot stabilize.55 As a result, Sapho tends to be a reservoir of fragments from which Vivien would frequently draw on afterward.This expanded form of a collection—“dilated” is the term used by Swinburne—adopted the goal of his interpretation, since, by filling in the lacunae and omissions and by juxtaposing different translations and interpretations of the same fragment,Vivien too intended to restore unity to Sappho’s work while mimicking her dismembered poetry. Undoubtedly, Baudelaire had a great deal of influence on this “restoration.” Charles Maurras observed that Renée Vivien had

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FIGURE 2.1 Cover by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer for Sapho by Renée Vivien (1903).

FIGURE 2.2 A spread from Sapho by Renée Vivien (1903).

“conceived of the lyre player according to the spirit of 1857.”56 It was just a small step from that to denying her any originality, as the critic Pierre Quillard did when he criticized her for having borrowed at times “the bitter thrill of femmes damnées” from Les Fleurs du mal /  The Flowers of Evil.57 Maxime Formont’s more nuanced analysis acknowledged that “the characters who appear in Renée Vivien’s work recall the Seekers of Infinity found in Baudelaire,” but he pointed out as well that “the analogy presupposes, along with the resemblances, certain dissimilarities.”58 If certain formal similarities do exist between Baudelaire’s and Vivien’s work, the latter offered nonetheless a very personal vision of Sappho’s poetry. In her translation, the brevity of the mutilated fragments often yields to the amplification of sapphic accents, the prolixity of the one filling the lacunae of the other. Vivien filled in the gaps with poems that are much more developed than the original text, which is lacking in detail. This strategy elicited praise from Charles Maurras: “We are in the presence of a daring work that does no damage; the original text remains intact; the Greek verses are not obscured; they are translated and developed; and the style of this French transposition is not lacking in finesse or even in purity.”59 At the end of the 1920s, however, the literary critic Yves-Gérard Le Dantec judged it severely as “Sappho reconstituted and excessively enlarged around the fragments that remain of her poetry.”60 As early as 1910, the writer Jean de Gourmont accused Vivien of having opted for “paraphrases”61 and took her to task over her amplification in sixteen verses of the line “Toward you, my beauties, my thought has not changed” without seeing that the variants in the development of the stanza are linked to a translation in progress.62 The last quatrain is devoted to the synergy between Sappho and her modern translator, and the immutability expressed in the original text is transformed into an exclamation of victory over time: “I do not change at all, O virgins of Lesbos /  I am eternal.” Vivien was still proclaiming Sappho’s eternal nature in Une Femme m’apparut . . . /  A Woman Appeared to Me . . . In this novel, a roman à clef published in 1904, she identifies sometimes with the narrator and sometimes with the androgynous figure San Giovanni, “poet of Mytilene, holy disciple of Psappha.”63 Like Vivien herself, San Giovanni was the author of a study of the Hellenic poetess.

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“Faithful translation” or “amplification of the sapphic idea”?64 The diversity of critiques is explained by the progressive assimilation of Renée Vivien with her ancient model.Vivien was called the “Sapho 1900, ou Sapho cent pour cent” /  “Sapho 100%” in catchphrases adopted by literary historians later in the century.65 She was the “charming Sappho”66 of 1903 and became “the daughter of Eve and Sappho”67 shortly after her death, before joining the ranks of “femmes damnées,” in the words of Jean Desthieux in 1937, who gave his work this title.68 “In Renée Vivien, we salute a new Sappho,” wrote the critic Jean Héritier in 1923.69 “Renée Vivien, like Psappha, was from Mytilene, the delicious island where virgins love one another,” explained Henriette Willette, the editor of an anthology dedicated to the recently deceased young poetess.70 Renée Vivien, who already had a number of admirers when she died, dedicated herself to poems of sapphic inspiration that launched a discreet cult that is still alive today.71 At first, this marginal female writer had found a complementary echo to her own feelings in Sappho’s poetry. Her purpose was clear: it entailed, following the example of her own sapphic poems, demonstrating that the fragments written by the classical muse were entirely devoted to female friends and had “neither a trace nor a stain” of the existence of men.72 Thus, she ignored the accusation of blasphemy that claimed the poetess was guilty of renouncing homosexuality; in her eyes, the condemnation that she encountered was less a consequence than a component of love. Her archaeological enterprise also had as its goal the restoration of the cult of Sappho. Beyond the close identification of the two women, however, Vivien was a poetess rather than an imitator. Her translation of Sappho was a source of inspiration in its content and its form, “a stimulus to her imagination,” wrote one essayist, who concluded that “the French muse has demonstrated a great deal of courage in celebrating openly the joys, the happiness, and the sorrows of these secret loves.”73 In the same year that she published her translation, Vivien composed a dramatic poem entitled “La Mort de Psappha” /  “The Death of Psappha.”74 It gave a preview of the route that would soon lead her to the “Hymne de Lesbos” /  “Hymn of Lesbos.” The verse that gave its title to this poem, “Sweetness of my songs, let’s go toward Mytilene,” expresses clearly her desire to discover in Greece

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“the shadow of Psappha” surrounded by her lovers and her pupils.75 After À l’heure des mains jointes /  At the Sweet Hour of Hand in Hand (1906), the historic person, as well as the work of Sappho, continued to inspire her, but from another viewpoint, since she rejoiced in the rebirth of the sapphic cult. Psappha lives and reigns again in our quivering bodies; Like her, we have heard the Siren, Like her, we have a peaceful soul, We who do not hear the insults of passersby Fervently we pray: let the night be doubled For us, whose kisses fear the dawn, for us Whose mortal love has weakened the knees, [for us] who are of troubled and bedazzled flesh.76 Vivien borrowed Sappho’s style and vocabulary. She “subordinated the accents of her lyre to all the nuances that her model proposed,” following a pattern of musical variations.77 Her fascination with the classical figure, however, turned eventually into an obsession. The modern poetess was haunted by sapphic Hellenism, even if the pagan spirit that shaped the thought of the Mytilenian poetess did not harmonize well with Vivien’s latent Christianity. There is no collection of Vivien’s work that does not include a reference or an allusion to the Hellenic muse and her lovers; titles, epigraphs, or fragments, imaginary scenes of Sappho’s companions, all infuse the heart of the poems, and her inspiration takes on multiple forms. Vivien’s admiration for Sappho the poetess attracts her to Sappho the lover and especially the lover of Atthis. This character, whose ubiquity and emblematic value in the original texts were pointed out by Reinach, was essential for Vivien. In Sappho’s poetry, Atthis’s name is linked to the heartbreak of love, and its negative connotation seduced the modern bard, who wrote repeatedly of the fickle lover. Indeed, she tried to make clear her interest in this young enigmatic woman in the preface to Sapho: “By evoking, across the mists of time, the sacred passions of the immortal Lover, my thought has turned toward Atthis, the less fervent, but better-loved friend, because it is for her that this divine sigh is raised: ‘I loved Atthis, in days gone by.’ ”78 Elsewhere she wrote, “I

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cannot help believing that she is the fugitive Beauty in ‘Ode to Aphrodite’ and ‘Ode to a Beloved Friend,’ to which tradition has attached incorrectly the name Anactoria.”79 Atthis, mentioned eight times in Sapho, symbolizes the woman loved, lost, or abandoned in other writing.80 She is there in the dramatic poem “La Mort de Psappha” /  “The Death of Psappha.” She is there again as the one who is undoubtedly responsible for Sappho’s suicide in “La Sirène muette” /  “The Silent Siren,” in which the poetess said the name of her faithless companion before leaping to her death.81 In the poem entitled simply “Atthis,” in the collection called Evocations, Vivien drew inspiration once again from this somber verse, which she used as an epigraph in order to write a long elegy in sapphic strophes that was, one suspects, addressed to Natalie Clifford Barney.82 The same line is found again in “Fête d’automne” /  “Autumn Festival” under the form “. . . in days gone by, I loved you . . .”;83 here the fragment is set off by ellipses as the memory is framed by the image of happiness lost—and by a text lost as well. Vivien made use of these few words, hardly changing them throughout her poems, like an echo. As an expression of a retreat into the self in an imaginary past, it combined the voices of Sappho and her imitator, “the captive of dreams and lost harmonies.”84 It is from this perspective that a large part of her work can be read, as a contemporary critic explained: “Through a nostalgia resembling that of the Stranger in ‘The Death of Psappha,’ Renée Vivien, down through the ages, in all her works, turned again and again obstinately toward Mytilene, and she evoked, by repeating, as the most powerful incantation, the mutilated fragments of the odes of Sappho, the passionate bard, in thrall to the immortal Aphrodite.”85 At the same time Vivien distanced herself from Sappho in order to give voice to her own dramas in her poetry, which was exacerbated by the closeness of a poetic perfection that seemed to her to be incomparable. By reconstructing around herself the poetical world of the Tenth Muse, she found herself confronting the tragedy of her own life and vocation. She dreaded falling into oblivion, but she hoped that by her intimate proximity to the sublime work of Sappho, she could be assured of literary posterity and could ward off “the shadow of death.”86 In her work the motif of immortality is

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the counterpart of that of death, and the translator identifies herself as a negative double of Sappho, as a “voice without an echo” or the “voice of a shadow.”87 Her awareness of this twin rupture is found in such titles as Échos et reflets /  Echoes and Reflections (1903) and L’Être double /  The Double Being (1904), both published under the pseudonym Paule Riversdale. This schism brought her to the verge of a real poetic depression, since her literary legacy was at stake. Vivien developed this idea of duality by inserting herself into the poems written in a classical style, in which she returned to the past in order to be initiated into the mysteries of love and poetry before supplanting the poet who inspired her. Her treatment of the Hellenic muse was not neutral or painless. In the dramatic poems, Sappho appears disembodied, and her voice is heard only through its absence. In “Atthis délaissée” /  “Atthis Abandoned,” it is “the voice of Psappha from a distant time” that speaks in the last three stanzas.88 When she inhabits a body, it is that of a dying woman. “Wrapped in thick black veils”89 or “not revealing her face,”90 she is dressed in her own mourning clothes and becomes, like her poem, a shadow ready to disappear and fall silent. In one of these poems, Sappho, who is upset at not knowing how “to play on the lyre /  the Ode to Aphrodite or the hymn to Adonis,” reveals her invisible presence by “a terribly long oriental lamentation.”91 The sapphic discourse comes close to indecipherability or seems to be definitively lost. That is what the poet Richard Hovey had already suggested in “A Dream of Sappho” (1896) when the Tenth Muse, whom he asked to “sing [him] one song of those books of [hers],” responds “as one who dreams: ‘I have forgotten them.’ ”92 Nevertheless, what Sappho refuses to do for Hovey she agrees to do for Vivien. In her collection of poems written in prose, Du vert au violet /  From Green to Violet (1903), Vivien imagined a physical version of this encounter between the Stranger and Sappho. Here the two poetesses confront each other, even if the Greek bard has the appearance of a ghost: One evening, she . . . heard an amorous voice singing, like the sea: “Come, Goddess of Kupros, and sweetly pour in golden couplets the honeyed nectar of joys.” And slowly a woman came out of the meditative shadow of the trees

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and stopped before the stranger, saying: “I am Psappha of Lesbos” . . . Her voice was like that of Peithe [who appears in “The Ode to Aphrodite”], the Persuasion who serves Aphrodite and leads human beings toward love . . . Hero contemplated her silently . . . A silence full of trembling enveloped them both. Their dissimilar beauty harmonized and complemented each other, and their dreams of longing for voluptuousness mingled together. “Come,” said the Woman of Lesbos at last, “I will teach you songs; I will teach you love.” She approached, and the lips of the virgin expired in the flames of the kiss.93 By putting herself in the role of a young nymph who succumbs to Sappho, Renée Vivien tried to bring together the two tendencies of self-effacement and self-affirmation—something that had obsessed her ever since she began her translation. In her poems, she identified with Sappho without wishing to supplant her; but by assuming a sort of dual personality, she ended up appropriating the soul and voice of the Greek poetess.This poetic encounter with the Hellenic muse was actually the subject of many of her adaptations; through the much-desired identification that provided the essential dynamism of her work, she produced a sort of fragmented translation that resembled a multilayered palimpsest. At the end of the nineteenth century, Sappho the author began to disappear from her own work. She was no more than “the echo of an echo,” as Oscar Wilde wrote.94 Despite their lacunae—or perhaps because of them—these classical poems, however fragmentary, inspired genuine literary creations and gave sapphism a measure of nobility. If the myth of Sappho was based on her poetry, this myth had, nevertheless, long since overtaken the work. Joseph KuhnRégnier expressed this idea humorously in an illustration entitled Sappho’s Salon in 191095 (see plate III), which reinterpreted the observation Maupassant had made over thirty years earlier: “People say that Sappho wrote sublime poetry. However, I certainly do not believe that this is her real claim to immortality.”96

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