EDITH HALL
(meaning critics who probe historical context
Jeffrey M. Duban
THE LESBIAN LYRE
Reclaiming Sappho for the 21st century
832pp. Clairview Books. £25.
978 1 905570 79 9
The Lesbian Lyre is an embittered assault on
almost every development in literature since
the late nineteenth century and an atavistic
plea for the reinstatement of an exclusionary
approach to poetry. But nonetheless, Jeffrey
M. Duban achieves the unlikely objective of
doing the literary Left a favour. Beneath the
tirades can be sensed an authentic craving for
the restoration of beauty and value as catego-
ries in discussion of art. For the Left, from
Marx and Engels via Piscator, Brecht and Crit-
ical Theory to New Historicism and Poststruc-
turalism, has consistently evaded Aesthetics.
It has scant language in which to discuss the
motivation of many people who enjoy poems,
art galleries or musical performances: that
they find them beautiful. Paradoxically this
reactionary study of ancient Greek literature
and its translation manages to enrich some of
our critical responses to art.
Duban asks what distinguishes a good trans-
lation of a Greek poem. The question might
have been put more succinctly than in his 761
monumental pages of annotated polemic, but it
is a legitimate one which he addresses from
seven angles over a historical sweep from
archaic Greek, Hebrew Latin and Early
Modern translators to contemporary poetry.
The first part argues that nobody should trans-
late ancient Greek unless they have an
advanced knowledge of the language (which
would disqualify not only Pope, but Seamus
Heaney, Frank McGuinness and Ted Hughes).
Part II compares translations of Sappho,
including recent ones by Willis Barnstone,
Paul Roche and Aaron Poochigan (while omit-
ting three fine translations by women who do
all know Greek, Josephine Balmer, Anne Car-
son and Diane Rayor). In Part III, Duban
reprints his own translations of Sappho and
four other archaic lyric poets, slightly modi-
fied, from a volume he published in 1983. An
incoherent melange of observations on litera-
ture’s evolution from Homer to imperial
Rome, albeit relieved by sporadically acute
observations on metre, acoustics and word
order, occupies Parts IV–VI; a dyspeptic com-
mentary on the damage done to poetry by
almost everyone since Ezra Pound closes the
volume.
Duban’s primary, aesthetic question oper-
ates as camouflage for the savagely ironic iter-
ation of ideological doctrines. This bellicose
aim is revealed in the subtitle’s assumption
that Sappho needs reclamation. It becomes
apparent that the enemies of Sappho are
legion. The first group consists of translators
without advanced knowledge of Latin and
Greek, along with scholars who have abetted
them by supplying cribs or linguistic consulta-
tions. The second group consists of myriad
critics who disagree with Duban about the
rights of non-classicists (for example, George
Steiner and Hugh Kenner, the author of a
canonical study of the era of modernism) to
hold opinions on classical literature. The third
group consists of Duban’s ideological bêtes
noires: “triumphalist” feminists, academic
writers he collectively describes as “Marxists”
laudable contributions of György Lukács on
in discussing art), amateur classicists, and
Greeks with the temerity to translate Homer
today into their living language. Worst are the
contemporary authors of what he castigates as
“democratized poetry”, from which “has come
debased diction, and lead from burnished
bronze”. So far so narrow-minded. But there is
a profound point underlying Duban’s dia-
tribes. It lies in the first chapters of his penulti-
mate Part VII, tucked away between antiquity
and modernism, where he talks about the
sublime.
The Greeks chose a metaphor from land-
scape to define the capacity of art to thrill or
exalt: the “sublime” translates “height” or
“summit” (hypsos). One ancient treatise
devoted to the sublime in literature has sur-
vived, by Longinus, writing in the Roman
imperial era. He defined sublime literature as
(1) capable of being heard repeatedly without
losing its power to elevate the soul and stimu-
late the intellect, (2) making an ineradicable
impact on the memory and (3) appealing uni-
versally across cultures and times. Longinus,
courageously, then tries to explain the
mechanics of why and how specific texts fulfil
these criteria.
Other ancient terms also belonged to the
semantic complex surrounding the idea of
transcendent art – “golden”, “wonder-induc-
ing”, “honey-sweet”, “spellbinding”. Just
because the branch of philosophy called aes-
thetics was not invented until Baumgarten and
Kant in the eighteenth century does not mean
that people before then did not understand
beauty, taste, and artistic judgement. The
recent collection of essays, Aesthetic Value in
Classical Antiquity edited by Ineke Sluiter and
Ralph Rosen (2012), has illuminated this
topic. The ancients knew it is easier to experi-
ence, or remember experiencing, the sublime
than to describe it. They set their archetypal
showdown between sublime and useful poetry
in a work known as The Contest of Homer and
Hesiod. Here the two great early hexameter
poets competed for the audience’s approval at
funeral games held in Euboea. The audience
twice voted for Homer because his verse filled
them with wonder and “so far transcended
what was merely fitting”. Crucially, we are
told that Homer survives the test of time: at
feasts “even today”, says the probably second-
century AD author who describes this contest,
there are recitals of Homer’s amazing verses
on the pleasure people feel at a public banquet
when the wine begins to flow. But in archaic
Euboea, the killjoy King Paneides over-rode
the audience’s instinctive aesthetic response to
superior poetry, insisting that the victory must
go to Hesiod, who exhorted his listeners to
agriculture and peace, rather than the poet of
battle and bloodshed. In doing so Paneides set
a precedent for worthy sociological and func-
tional evaluation of art, of the kind so despised
by Duban, for all time.
I find myself reluctantly agreeing with
Duban: I have always wanted to rewrite the
Contest and give to the mass audience, who
unanimously preferred Homer, some argu-
ments to support their judgement. But there is
a dearth of available arguments. A true Marxist
“aesthetic”, facing up to beauty, timelessness,
transcendence and sublimity, has always been
missing, since Marx and Engels inconsider-
ately failed to prioritize art when dissecting
capitalism. The problem remains, despite the
Longinus offers a masterclass in practical crit-
realism and fiction, Walter Benjamin on
mechanical reproduction, Fredric Jameson on
the ideological force of form and Terry Eagle-
ton on the terrifying beauty of tragedy. Chris-
topher Caudwell’s contention that “any
artwork is valuable only insofar as it increases
human freedom” may be true, but that leaves
the problem of defining human “freedom”:
there are freedoms to imagine and to experi-
ence the sensory as well as political and eco-
nomic freedoms.
The reasons why critics of the Left run away
from the concepts of beauty, sublimity and
value are that they do not want to endorse a
type of language associated with elites, and
that “sublimity” and “beauty” have indeed
often lain in the contingent, subjective eye of
ruling-class beholders. The gaudy excesses of
baroque architecture which impressed seven-
teenth-century viewers may seem hideous
today. Beauty and sublimity are also, to a large
extent, culturally variable and relative: this
makes declarations that any artwork is “excel-
lent” susceptible to critique from a postcolo-
nial perspective. Yet to avoid talking about
what makes art great, or the mot juste “juste”,
is to abjure enquiring into art’s unique potency
both within discrete cultural contexts and for
the human race as a whole. Duban’s intuition
that we have lost something important in exil-
ing beauty and sublimity from the discourse of
professional classicists is, sadly, correct.
Nothing much has changed since T. S. Eliot
wrote in the January 1933 issue of The Crite-
rion, “the Marxian is compelled to scorn
delights . . . and live laborious days in deciding
what art ought to be”. The “Marxian” must
renounce “the furtive and facile pleasures of
Homer and Virgil” for enquiries into the eth-
nicity and political allegiances of these authors
at best, and the “social criticism” of modern
novelists such as Hemingway at worst. But
why, we should be asking, need the progres-
sive critic, who recognizes the intertwining of
art with social, political and even economic
phenomena, inevitably renounce “delight”
and “pleasure”?
Of course, the study of any culture, past or
present, needs to incorporate analysis of the
ephemeral, the transient, the derivative, the
“popular”, the mundane and everyday as well
as of “masterpieces”. Classicists have rightly
long since admitted into their syllabuses
ancient romantic novels, pornography, magic
spells, “low” mime, cheap terracotta figurines
and graffiti alongside the Odyssey, Sophocles’
Antigone and Myron’s Discobolus. But in
recent years have they been neglecting to talk
about the brilliance of the best of ancient art?
It is one thing to say that we can learn as much
about ancient gender, ethnicity, slavery, ritual
and society from the Hellenistic novel known
as The Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habro-
comes as from the Iliad. It is quite another to
assert that the latter has no more aesthetic
value than the former.
Duban reminds us that Sappho’s most daz-
zling love lyric – “He seems to me to be equal
to the gods” – is only available to us because
Longinus cited it when asking how it achieved
sublimity: Sappho authentically evokes how it
feels to be erotically smitten by carefully
selecting and describing the speaker’s subjec-
tive experience of individual physical symp-
toms affecting heartrate, voice, temperature,
vision, hearing, perspiration and complexion.
the Academy: by failing to produce a theory of
icism by explaining that she unites in the poem aesthetic value, the literary Left has relin-
sensations which actually make her feel frag- quished the best critical tunes to the devil of
mented and that she contrasts contradictory diehard conservatism.
sensations such as heat and cold. If, like Longi-
nus, we can explain exactly what makes art of
any kind great, we are better equipped to pro-
mote humanities in general, and classics in
particular, than by being able to point out its
inherent class ideology.
So Duban’s tirade prompts an essential
question. If Sappho’s poem still makes readers
tingle, how are “Marxist-feminist” cultural
historians to explain its value? Within the vari-
ous schools of criticism loosely related to
“Marxism” there are several promising ideas
available. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cul-
tural capital” need not preclude asking what
makes classical tragedy or statuary seem to
most people, most of the time, more valuable
capital than some other art. In Red Kant
(2014), the film specialist Michael Wayne has
recuperated Kantian ideas of the beautiful to a
materialist appreciation of culture by focus-
sing on such older Marxist concepts as art’s
“utopian tendency” – its ability to transcend, in
the imaginative sphere, the social restrictions
of its moment of production. Again, the
famous work of Sappho has enjoyed such mul-
tiplicity of editions that it has achieved “rela-
tive autonomy” from the society which
produced it: Sappho has long been a potent cul-
tural presence. The familiarity of an artwork
can contribute to the pleasure with which it is
apprehended. So can the way it has historically
informed expectations of artistic excellence,
as the works of Pheidias have affected the way
we see and respond to visual art ever since,
whether in emulation or reaction. The concept
of the dialectic which Marxism inherited from
Hegel is also promising; some aestheticians of
the Left have experimented with the idea that
art is excellent to the extent that it symbolically
crystallizes the ideological conflicts which
drive history and cultural change. Plato’s best
writing at the dawn of western philosophy
receives its glittering and apparently timeless
allure from two such inbuilt tensions: between
dramatic dialogue form, rhythmic prose and
intimate, chatty colloquialism and between
mythic/mystical imagery and rational induc-
tive method. Moreover, recent developments
in other disciplines promise new perspectives
on how some artworks have transcultural and
time-transcending value, however ethnically
relative some notions of beauty may be. Neu-
roscience has begun physically to measure
art’s effects on the parts of the brain which
respond to pleasure, and to show how rhythm
can decrease anxiety, regularise heartbeat and
produce happiness-inducing chemicals.
Gabrielle Starr explains this eloquently in
Feeling Beauty (2013). The questions asked
by such research can be informed by older
theories including the mathematicians’
“Golden Ratio” and the evolutionary biolo-
gists’ “Savannah Hypothesis”, which has
studied the widespread human attraction to
sights incorporating diversity of colour and
texture, pattern and asymmetry, clusters and
multiple viewing corridors.
The appreciation of beauty and sublimity is
instrumental in our constant return to great art-
works, including the exquisite poetry of Sap-
pho. Duban’s broadside, however obsessive,
and however transient its own impact will
probably prove, is a symptom of a malaise in