"Grey as Papyrus Grass": Sappho 31 and the Projection of the Self into Text
Author: Lee Sharks
Tags: #Sappho #Fragment31 #LyricTime #AffectivePoetics #TextualSelf #Anamnesis #Catullus51 #RecursiveLyric
Abstract
This study reassesses Sappho Fragment 31 (Voigt) by relocating the poem’s fulcrum from erotic jealousy to an epistemological rupture in which the lyric voice foresees, and deliberately engineers, its own transmission to future readers. Through close philological analysis, reception history (Longinus, Catullus 51, Hellenistic commentaries), and media‑theoretical reflection on papyrus as both plant and writing‑substrate, I argue that Sappho constructs a self‑archiving mechanism. The beloved’s laughter catalyzes—not completes—the poem; the true telos is a reader situated beyond the original performance horizon. Thus Fragment 31 becomes an ur‑case of lyric temporality: anamnesis projected forward, rather than recollection cast backward.
Keywords: Sappho 31; Catullus 51; lyric temporality; papyrology; self‑archiving; jealousy; reception.
1 Introduction
Sappho 31 (φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν…) is one of antiquity’s most commented‑upon texts.¹ Scholarship from Wilamowitz (1891) to Lardinois (1996) traditionally foregrounds jealousy—the speaker’s physiological unravelling in the face of an unnamed man conversing with the beloved. Yet the intensity of that dissolution exceeds the narrative convenience of a triangular erotic plot. The poem does not end with death or with declaration of desire; it ends with a vegetal simile that, I contend, points to writing itself.
In what follows, I (1) situate current debates, (2) present a new text‑critical translation, (3) track the poem’s progression from deictic immediacy to material self‑projection, (4) read the chlōros simile through papyrological evidence, and (5) test the argument against Catullus 51’s adaptive logic. The payoff is two‑fold: a philologically tighter account of Sappho’s imagery and a media‑historical claim that lyric’s very emergence is tied to the fantasy of its own futurity.
2 Text and Translation
Greek (Voigt fr. 31):
φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν
ἔμμεν ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνεί-
σας ὐπακούεικαὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν, τό μ’ ἦ μὰν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόησεν·
ὡς γὰρ ἔς σ’ ἴδω βρόχε’, ὤς με φωνὰς
οὐδ’ ἒν ἔτ’ εἴκει,ἀλλὰ καμ μὲν γλῶσσα †ἔαγε†, λέπτον
δ’ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ’ οὐδὲν ὄρημμ’, ἐπ’ αὔταις
ἴδρως κακχέεται,τρόμος δὲ παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ
ποίας ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ’ ὀλίγω ’πιδεύης
φαίνομ’ ἔμ’ αὔτᾳ.
Translation (author):
He seems to me—any man—to rival the gods
who, sitting face‑to‑face with you,
hears close by your honeyed voice
and that enchanting laughwhich, truly, shivers my heart within my breast.
For the instant I glance at you,
no speech remains to me:
the tongue breaks,
a subtle fire races under my skin,
sight dims—I see nothing—
a pounding in the ears, sweat floods,
tremor seizes every limb;
I grow greener than papyrus grass,
and I feel on the verge of vanishing.
Textual Note
The cruces in line 9 (γλῶσσα ἔαγε) follow Voigt’s cautious daggers; most editors emend to ἔαγε (“is shattered”) or ἔπαγες (“became stiff”). Either reading emphasises disarticulation, reinforcing the argument below.²
3 Survey of Interpretive Trajectories
| School / Trend | Representative Voices | Core Thesis |
|---|---|---|
| Jealousy / Eros‑pathology | Page 1955; Campbell 1967; Stehle 1990 | Physiological symptoms = envy at male rival. |
| Homo‑erotic Ritual | Snyder 1981; duBois 1995 | Communal passage into adult sexuality; man is foil. |
| Psycho‑somatic Sublime | Longinus Peri Hypsous 10; Burnett 1983 | Catalog of pathos illustrating sublimity. |
| Performance‑Context | Lardinois 1996; Yatromanolakis 2004 | Wedding or symposium setting; meta‑theatrical self‑reflexivity. |
| Material Philology / Media | Svenbro 1993; Bringmann 2012 | Early lyric already haunted by its papyrus after‑life. |
My reading aligns with the last group yet pushes further: the poem does not merely anticipate a written medium; it thematizes its own conversion into papyrus through the chlōros image, thus pre‑inscribing a future reader.
4 Close Reading: From Deixis to Medium
4.1 Deictic Overload (ll. 1–4)
The poem opens in present‑tense shock: φαίνεταί—“he appears.” Deixis (“that man,” “you”) locks speaker and addressee in an immediate visual field. Yet the syntax already slips: κῆνος (“that person there”) is distal, hinting at narrative distance even as the scene pretends immediacy.³
4.2 Somatic Cascade (ll. 5–12)
Longinus admired the piling of symptoms. But note the modal shift: description becomes performative disintegration. The speaker’s body translates affect into sensory failures. Importantly, these failures are enumerable. The poem tracks them like data points—voice, skin, sight, hearing—as though for later retrieval.
4.3 Vegetal Simile & Media Theory (ll. 13–16)
χλωροτέρα ποίας ἔμμι, “I am greener‑paler than grass.” Greek chlōros ranges from fresh‑green to pallid‑grey.⁴ Many dismiss the simile as cliché for faintness. Yet “grass” (poia) invokes wild fodder, while papyrus (Cyperus papyrus) is a riparian sedge, dull‑green to ashen when dried—the primary writing material of archaic Lesbos.⁵ Nothing in the Lesbian landscape matches papyrus precisely; its exoticism matches the speaker’s altered state. I propose a metonymic leap: Sappho imagines herself turning into the very substrate that will carry her words.
5 Lyric Temporality: Anamnesis Forward
Havelock (1963) and Nagy (1990) argue that Greek lyric mediates cultural memory. Fragment 31 radicalises this function: the speaker’s deracination is not a collapse but a re‑ rooting in textual time. The poem stores experiential surplus in durable form. The beloved’s laughter triggers encoding; the act of leukosis (bleaching papyrus) hovers behind chlōros—green imminently turned pale, ready for ink.
6 Catullus 51: Reciprocal Inscription
Catullus’ Ille mi par esse deo videtur mirrors Sappho line for line yet adds his own coda: otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est. Leisure—otium—breeds the speaker’s angst. By naming the social condition that permits lyricization, Catullus confirms Sappho’s media turn: he recognises that space‑to‑write itself hazards dissolution. His poem is not homage but re‑inscription; he steps into the archival mechanism Sappho inaugurated, acknowledging both its power and its psychic cost.
7 Conclusion
Fragment 31 is not simply a jewel of erotic lyric; it is an originary meditation on how lyric survives. The poem choreographs a shift from bodily immediacy to material afterlife—speaker → papyrus → reader. Jealousy is surface‑noise; the deeper drama is archival. By declaring herself “greener‑paler than papyrus grass,” Sappho figures her own vegetal conversion into text. That gesture situates the poem at the genesis‑point of Western self‑archiving, making the reader—ancient, Roman, medieval, modern—the true second participant in the scene.
Bibliography (Select)
Burnett, A. P. Three Archaic Poets. Duckworth, 1983.
Campbell, D. A. Greek Lyric Poetry. Bristol, 1967.
duBois, P. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago, 1995.
Havelock, E. A. Preface to Plato. Harvard, 1963.
Lardinois, A. “Who Speaks the Song?…,” TAPA 126 (1996): 29‑56.
Longinus. Peri Hypsous. ed. Russell, 1964.
Nagy, G. Pindar’s Homer. Johns Hopkins, 1990.
Page, D. L. Sappho and Alcaeus. Oxford, 1955.
Stehle, E. Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece. Princeton, 1997.
Svenbro, J. Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Cornell, 1993.
Voigt, E.‑M. Sappho et Alcaeus, 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1971.
Footnotes
For a concise dossier, see Page 1955: 47–62; Campbell 1967: 182‑85.
Campbell follows Lobel’s ἔπαγες; I retain Voigt’s daggers to foreground textual uncertainty integral to my argument.
On distal deixis as horizon‑marker, cf. Deixis studies in Svenbro 1993: 81‑94.
Chlōros colour range: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique s.v. χλωρός.
For Nile papyrus trade to the Aegean, see Lewis & Papazoglou, Papyrus and Early Greek Books, GRBS 42 (2001): 125‑40.
