april 4.2003
BOOKS
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Poetic justice
Extraordinary queer love poetry from Sappho
through the first World War
becomes eloquently clear in these poems: There
is no place for homophobia in the manly heart.
But beside questions on the nature of love
comes commentary on the honor of war. A t
this time in our country’s life, it would do us
well to spend some time in these voices:
Pour out your light, O stars, and do run hold
Your loveliest shining from earth's outworn shell
Pure and cold your radiance, pure and cold
My dead friend’s face as well.
Lads is a great place to visit to remember
what war is really like.
— Glenn Williams
L ads : L ove P oetry o f t h e T renches
edited by Martin Taylor; Duckworth, 2002 reprint;
$9.95 softcover
T
he big question raised by this fine anthology
is: W hat is the nature of man-to-man love?
Is there a love between men that lies
somewhere between our notions o f “straight"
and “gay"? Is it possible for a man to love
another man rn every way that a man can love
a mate, hut without sex, and still he straight?
Lads: Love Poetry o f the Trenches is an extraor
dinary collection of poetry that explores this
“somewhere between.” O ne can argue for
decades, as modem culture has, whether there is
a form of man-to-man love that is not inherently
homosexual (at least on the old sliding scale, Dr.
Kinsey). This collection, taken as a whole, seems
to argue that love comes in all kinds o f radical
packages and that each couples bonds are as
unique and unclassifiahle as snowflakes.
Iuuls was first collected in 1989 by that
indom itable force o f literature, the late M ar
tin Taylor. In it are poems by little-know n
and well-established poets alike— all o f them
writers who have experienced the trenches,
mustard gas and death o f W orld W ar I. You’ll
he surprised at how blatant these poems get.
Yes, I've known the love uv a w om an , lad,
And m aybe I shall again,
But I knows a stronger love than theirs,
And that is the love o f m en.
certain about Sappho apart from the fact that
she lived in the “city of Mytilene on the island
of Lesbos from about 630 B.C .” and “appears to
have devoted her life to composing songs.” The
majority of these had a common theme: the fine
art of loving women.
These translations, beautifully presented
here with the Greek en face, is based on a
1971 transcript by scholar Eva-Maria Voigt
published in Amsterdam. Carson used “the
plainest language I could find, using where pos
sible the same order of words and thoughts as
Sappho did.” T h e text is centered on the page
in rich font, while empty brackets are used to
denote what’s missing:
I f N ot , W in ter : F ragments of S appho
edited by A n ne C arson ; K n opf, 2 0 0 2 ; $14
softcover
nne Carson has done it again. All the music
of the language, the mystery of the legend
and the poetic musings of the most celebrated
lesbian folk singer o f all time, Sappho, are master
fully collected into a work of epic proportions.
Drawing on her vast knowledge of both myth
and history, the McGill University classics profes
sor explains in her introduction that many of
Sappho’s poems have been recovered piece by
piece (and often remain in pieces) when gathered
for printing. She offers what she pens as “Sap
pho’s reflections on love, desire, marriage, exile,
cushions, bees, old age, shame, time, chickpeas
and many other aspects of the human situation.”
No stranger to translation, Carson has an
impressive list of texts under her linguistic belt:
Her Eros the Bittersweet explored Sappho’s term
“glukupikron,”
or “sweethitter,"
among other
Greek concepts,
while the poems
in Autobiography
o f Red reinvent
ed the literary
remains of the
Greek poet
Stesichorus.
In her four-
page preface
Carson address
es how very lit
tle is known for
But to go there
] much
talks [
N ot easy for us to equal goddesses in lovely
form
] desire
and [ ] Aphrodite
] nectar poured from gold
1 with hands Persuasion...
] into desire I shall com e. ..
A
A must for any collector o f Sapphic transla
tion, If Not, Winter will he a treasure for lovers
o f women for years to come.
— Marie Fleischmann
C onfusion : T he P rivate P apers of P rivy
C ouncillor R. von D
by Stefan Zweig; Pushkin Press, 2003; $14 softcover
vailable for the first time in an English
translation (its original European publica
tion was in 1927), the late Austrian-horn
novelist Stefan Zweig’s Confusion: The Private
Papers o f Privy Councillor R . von D is an
admirably economical novel that should
intrigue anyone interested in the sociological
aspects of queer lit, detailing as it does the pre
vailing attitudes o f a certain place (Berlin) and
time (not too far into the 20th century) toward
homosexuality.
T h e heterosexual Zweig is remarkably
enlightened, considering his milieu; more
importantly, the Ixxrk is a fine example of
structure, craft and how to do ambiguity—
sexual and otherwise— right.
Comprising the fictional “private papers” of
A
a highly
regarded pro
fessor as he
looks hack
upon his life,
Confusion
immerses the
reader in the
first-person
recollection
o f a single-
minded
obsession—
that of the
professor’s
younger self
toward his own professor, a man capable of
inflaming a passion that, the young man
thinks, comes solely from the older man’s com
pelling, contagious love o f literature.
As the student becomes dependent upon
his professor’s approbation, the professor’s own
ambivalent behavior exacerbates the already
opaque fixation of our narrator. Aware of his
own feelings and the potential ethical— not to
mention social— pitfalls involved in falling for
a male student, the professor plays a confusing,
tormented/tormenting, push/pull game with
the young m an’s emotions.
For his part, the protégé, who talks the pro
fessor into resuming long-abandoned work and
becomes his assistant, is extremely disturbed by
his beloved m entor’s hot and cold running
moods and the strange timbre of his household
and marriage. T h e understandably jaded wife
even warns him about a vague something on
the professor’s end o f which he may prefer to
remain ignorant. These mysterious circum
stances stir up and oddly mirror the student’s
own tangled (if wholly sublimated) feelings.
A bittersweet— emphasis on the bitter—
closing confession marks the climax o f a rela
tively short, rhythmically building narrative
that’s unmistakably sexual in structure, from
the initial stirrings to the accumulation of ten
sion to the spilling over o f confessional release
at the end.
T he prose is occasionally too purple, which
could be more a problem with the translation
than authorial misdirection, but it’s an insignif
icant flaw amid the effortlessly woven, decep
tively simple narrative pleasures Confusion has
to offer.
— Christopher M cQuain J H
GLENN W illiams is the community relations
manager at the U oyd C enter Barnes & N oble.
M arie F leischmann is the Editorial Assistant at
Just Out.
C hristopher M c Q uain is a Seattle free-lance
writer.
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