Sappho’s Song for Aphrodite 🔒🔥🔥🔥

The only complete poem we have by Sappho, and therefore probably the most famous, is her Hymn to Aphrodite, or Ode to Aphrodite. (There’s also a Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite—which wasn’t composed by Homer, despite what we call it—that shouldn’t be confused with Sappho’s poem.) It would make a wonderful video, but this is not it.

What I’m calling Sappho’s Song for Aphrodite is a different poem, which is incomplete but still one of the longer fragments we have of hers. We know it’s for Aphrodite because in the final verse mentions Kypris, a common name for Aphrodite that Sappho often used. I think it’s one of Sappho’s most beautiful poems and I actually prefer it (slightly) to her more famous Hymn to Aphrodite, and that’s why I picked it for this video.

I also tried to do something different with it than I’ve done with Sappho’s poems in my previous videos. As I’ve mentioned, Sappho was a lyric poet—she sang her work and performed to it musical accompaniment. I hesitate calling her a rock star (too many potentially unfortunate associations—anyone remember the awesome goat-roasting line from Best in Show? 😉), but in terms of the stature she had and the adulation she received, the term does kind of fit.

So it seemed to me this incomplete poem should be musically treated. It’s long enough, which very little of her surviving work is. But how to do that? Obviously, we know nothing of Sappho’s music and the language she spoke and composed in (Aeolic Greek) was archaic and nearly dead 2000 years ago. Clearly, anything remotely approaching her music is impossible and wouldn’t be accessible to hardly anyone if it was.

Could Anne Carson’s wonderful translation be set to music? I was dubious. Written out, it doesn’t seem very musical, at least to me.

I thought about and I thought about it and then I did something weird (it seemed weird to my anyway). I went to Producer.ai and laid my problem on it. That is, I chatted with the Producer and explained what I had, who wrote it (Sappho), the translation I was using and asked: “Can this be made musical?”

The Producer, who gets chatty at times, responded it was a fascinating and challenging project. There was some back and forth. It made suggestions, I made suggestions, then we let it rip.

I was, well… shocked. I liked it.

Now I had some music, and I needed to make a video to go with it.. And I did. Parts were straightforward, parts weren’t, and this kinda weird bit happened, but I thought was cute and left it in. It’s at least partly Riley’s fault! 😂

Riley, when you watch this, don’t blame me! You do way too many awesome things that put way too many ideas in my head! (Like her!)

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