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I Beg You, Gongyla

Spyros D. Orfanos
Published online: 12 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Spyros D. Orfanos (2011): I Beg You, Gongyla, Psychoanalytic
Perspectives, 8:2, 283-283
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1551806X.2011.10486319

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I Beg You, Gongyla

283

I BEG YOU, GONGYLA

By Sappho (600 B.C.E.)

Downloaded by [202.125.222.186] at 08:06 02 June 2013

Translated from the Greek by Spyros D. Orfanos, PhD, ABPP

Before the era of luminous rationalism, the Classical Greeks idealized
beauty and E m . Sappho, the poet from the Aegean island of Lesbos,
best exemplified this sensibility with a pure lyricism, full of Dionysian
impulses and dynamism. For 25 centuries her love poems have survived,
albeit in fragments, because they affirm the senses of beauty.
Come back again, I beg you, Gongyla.
Reveal yourself in your garment
white as milk; o what desire
forever around you, my lovely girl.
This charming garment stirs her
who beholds you, for she who expresses
this reproach to you is the goddess herself
Cyprus-born, whom now I invoke.

N W Iostdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

240 Greene St., Suite 303
New York, NY 10003
spyrosdorfanos@gmail.com
Spyros D. Orfanos, PhD, ABPP, is clinic director at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is also president of the International Association
of Kelational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He studies art, literature, and philosophy as
aspects of some kind ofwhole human endeavor, often called civilization and culture, but not as
social scientists use the terms. He claims to be able to hear Sappho singing, Eros,Eros, Eros.