| Title | : | Eros the Bittersweet |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1564781887 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781564781888 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 189 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1986 |
Eros the Bittersweet Reviews
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If something terrible happens to me one day, and all that's left is my body, and if, around the same time, something terrible should happen to Anne Carson and all that's left is her brain, I would hope that somehow medical science and luck would combine, and allow these terrible accidents to be resolved through a relatively happy solution, by which one of us (not Ms. Carson) would be greatly improved.
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In one of her chapters Anne Carson writes, "Imagine a city where there is no desire. Supposing for the moment that the inhabitants of the city continue to eat, drink and procreate in some mechanical way; still, their life looks flat. They do not theorize or spin tops or speak figuratively. Few think to shun pain; none give gifts. They bury their dead and forget where [ . . . ] A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination."
Carson's elucidation of this idea - that desire is what moves the mind to imagine - is beautiful and compelling. Through the course of her exploration of "eros," Carson offers fascinating cultural details on the ancient Greeks and analyzes small poetry fragments that I've never read before. One of my favorites is from Archilochos who wrote what "it feels like to be violated by Eros:
Such a longing for love, rolling itself up under
my heart,
poured down much mist over my eyes,
filching out of my chest the soft lungs--
Carson's analysis of this fragment is mind-opening for those readers who appreciate close reading. She does the same for Sappho, as well as others, but keeps her focus narrowed on the question of why we love to fall in love. By the time I was done reading, I became convinced it is because our minds take the deepest joy in the beauty of metaphor - of the heart's palpitating excitement over the difference in two unlike things. The space between them is the ache of desire. Bittersweet indeed. -
Anne Carson is brilliant!! This book about eros, and literature, reading, words, imagination, love, desire, is a pleasure to read.
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Anne Carson’s debut book is certainly an impressive piece of scholarship, which, for this particular reader, made this both a pleasure and a burden to trudge through. Summoning her impressive knowledge of Greek drama, prose (both philosophic and fictional) and poetry, Carson conjures a daring argument about the symbiotic and triangular connections between words on a page, their writer and their reader, with the notion of “desire” as the Spanish Fly that keeps all the sweaty limbs and soiled sheets intertwined and sticky.
Organized in a series of short chapters, Carson makes her slow way from the poetic fragments of Sappho to her final destination of a long dissembling of one of Plato’s dialogues featuring Socrates schooling a young upstart named Phaedrus on topics such as desire, man and boy love, and writing—and all of this the elaborate and belabored groundwork for her argument that serious readers and writers are nothing but a bunch of sex-crazed degenerates…or something like that. As much of a rousing celebration this book is for the love of Literature, too much of her prose is dry and bloated with jargon and rhetoric for this particular, not-smart-enough reader. Don’t get the wrong idea, this is definitely a well-rounded feast for thought but I look forward to dipping my finger into
Glass Irony and God for a taste of her poetry. -
There are no words for how perfect this book is. A gorgeous exploration of the edges of personhood, letters, desire. Endlessly fascinating and utterly engrossing. I couldn't put it down. I want to fall in love.
A sample from a favorite passage:
"The English word 'symbol' is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover. ...
Every hunting, hungering lover is half a knucklebone, wooer of a meaning that is inseparable from its absence. The moment when we understand these things - when we see what we are projected on a screen of what we could be - is invariably a moment of wrench and arrest. We love that moment, and we hate it. We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible. ...
Sappho drew this conception together and called Eros glukupikron [bittersweet]." -
"Both the experience of desire and the experience of reading have something to teach us about edges. We have endeavored to see what that is by consulting ancient literature, lyric and romantic, for its exposition of eros. We have watched how archaic poets shape love poems (as triangles) and how ancient novelists construct novels (as a sustained experience of paradox). We caught sight of a similar outline, even in Homer, where the phenomenon of reading and writing resurfaces in Bellerophon's story. We speculated about writers' purposes (to seduce readers?) and we are finally led to suspect that what the reader wants from reading and what the lover wants from love are experiences of very similar design. It is a necessarily triangular design, and it embodies a reach for the unknown." (109)
This was my first experience reading Carson, and it was beautiful. -
Carson always perches her work in the most precarious positions. One wonders what exactly they are holding in their hand: is it
scholarship? A
novel? An
art book? A
translation? A
sequel? A
reimagining?
Such questions are certainly important, but ultimately feel somewhat beside the point insofar as the response always seems to be a quiet but unapologetic "it is, and—." I found it curious yet unsurprising that Eros, Carson's first published text, is so preoccupied with paradox and "in-between" spaces in general: now some thirty+ years on it's clear that is exactly the place where she has situated her own work. Carson seems to implicitly pose every one of her texts as a hypothesis, mere points of departure for exploration and experimentation. This approach that has admittedly lead to a somewhat uneven oeuvre, encompassing works as indisputably minor as major.
I sense that there are simplifications and scholarly holes in Eros that those of us not intimately familiar with the Classics or the syntactical construction of ancient Greek—which I assume comprises the majority of her readership—are not able to spot, so dazzled are we by such a virtuosic yet elegant rhetorical performance. But that's exactly what makes Carson so singular. If I wanted a scholarly analysis of Sappho, of The Phaedrus, Greek culture, or any other of the countless topics Carson alights upon throughout Eros I'm sure I could find one, two, or many more more carefully researched, argued, and meticulously footnoted.
But I'm also quiet sure that they likely wouldn't be able to help me grasp or begin negotiating this sweetbitter experience of eros in which I currently find myself painfully suspended. -
"För att hon har återuppväckt Sapfo från de döda och införlivat henne i modern tid"
- Svenska Akademiens nobelmotivering till Anne Carson, en inte alltför avlägsen framtid (?). -
Ένα εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον δοκίμιο που τιμά τον Έρωτα, μέσα από τη διασύνδεση φιλοσοφίας και ποίησης!!! Ένα μεγάλο ρισπεκτ στην κυρία Κάρσον για αυτό της το δημιούργημα!!!
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un libro lindísimo sobre el deseo, el amor, y la escritura 💗💗💗 he disfrutado muchísimo leyendo
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Anne Carson, following Sappho, argues that Eros is a lack, a wound, a gesture toward a wholeness that's only possibility exists in our total self-annihilation. This sort of also describes my relationship to this book. I can only read it as a void, a gaping hole in myself, knowing that I will never make something so perfect.
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“So I found
that hunger was a way
of persons outside windows
that entering takes away. –Emily Dickinson, I Had Been Hungry -
It's all coming back to me now, why I dislike this kind of theoretical, transhistorical argument grounded in a series of close readings. The author appears to believe that she has stumbled upon a deep psychological, even ontological, truth which transcends all context and time, as well as any counter-examples. This is an enormous claim, and it would take something verging on religious faith to countenance it based on what it presented here. My own personal experience is an important counter-example, yet I feel sure the author would without hesitation dismiss my ability to access my own subjective experience as quickly as she dismisses Hephaistos and Aristophanes as uncredible witnesses. And yet they are making the same type of universal claim. Apparently the one thing everyone can agree upon is that a large claim is always better than a small, precise, specific claim.
Everyone except me.
The evidence for this kind of thing is never sufficient to support the vastness of the claim being made. And yet somehow we are meant to admire it as a kind of performance in itself, and to set aside our doubts and to believe based on the facility of that performance, evidence becoming and old-fashioned and largely irrelevant afterthought. Aside from everything else, the narcissism of this approach makes me livid.
Lurking here is also the unargued and by no means self-evident premise that is "culture". In these arguments, culture is a homogenous and monolithic THING, to which we have access via all and each of its productions, rather than a tension of similarity and difference, including its own variants and disputes, which needs much more care and information to be described accurately. In this sense, even the claims about the Greeks are too broad. They resemble, too, current simplistic constructions of identity and culture in the form of identity politics in which group trumps all. No wonder such facile constructions flourish in the humanities departments of universities: their inhabitants have never practiced any other type of thinking. It is deeply unfortunate that thinkers such as these have the care of the intellectual development of our young.
Oh, and let us not forget argument from authority, the appeal to performances past. What Freud says may be interesting, and indeed it may even be true, but if true, it is not so because he was the one who said it. This book has flashed me back to a career in a set of disciplines that would accept virtually any theory, provided that it was discredited in its original and proper disciplinary home. Something is terribly wrong with a community who will accept as valid the formulation, "well, Freud said".
I love literary study, and feel it should be taken seriously. And yet I find that those who dismiss it as pseudo-scientific, metaphysical woo-woo with no real value in any kind of rational or scientific community need not look far for examples of what they mean. What I would not give for better allies.
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Special moments in the ridiculousness hall of fame:
The Iliad Book 3: she mischaracterizes the nature of Aphrodite's threat. Either this is deliberate, in an effort to force a piece of evidence that does not fit into her schema, or she has actually come to see it this way because of her presuppositions. Either way, the evidence comes after the conclusion, and the author is not to be trusted.
The Uncertainty Principle: at a BASIC level, she does not understand that this principle describes the reality of quantum systems, and not an epistemological problem or the inside of the human mind. Being an expert on one thing does not make you an expert on everything. -
agree
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Would Anne Carson’s PhD thesis have made it today? It is exceptionally wide-ranging and ambitious. While being intimately grounded in the etymology, grammar and semantics of classical languages and well-versed with ancient Greek philosophy to boot, her ability to synthesise this learning and apply it to certain key questions which were circulating in American continental philosophy departments at the time is frankly overwhelming. As far as I can tell, her essay results from the convergence of trying to answer three broad philosophical questions. 1. What can we learn from ancient poetic and philosophic formulations of love triangles which might explain its inexorable ‘bittersweet’ quality? 2. To what extent is this theory of erotic triangulation analogous with the process of reading? 3. What is the impact of the deferral and stabilisation of meaning through the advent of writing on past and present literature and love? While these guiding questions can, with some effort, be elicited from Carson’s essay, to my knowledge, her answers largely retreat into what others have said before and leave it at that.
That is, if they are answered at all. At a 2015 talk in Buenos Aries, an interviewer clearly struggling with the logistics of a simultaneous live translation, wanted to know more about Carson’s ‘theory of love’ which she professed to admire. Carson was bemused. She explained how the work was drawn from a PhD and is pretentious, both in terms of its expression and its content. To try and come up with a theory of love is ‘a very teenage thing to do’, she quipped, and joked about how her husband hasn’t read it but keeps a copy in the car in case he ever gets trapped in a snowstorm. By way of apology, Carson emphasised how the essay was written over thirty years ago, and that she had very little idea of what it meant, and invited the interviewer to clarify it for her. There was an awkward pause before the next question.
I find it interesting that Carson considers her own work pretentious. While clearly this essay wears its erudition on its sleeve, in her later works she takes pains to write with her sleeves rolled up, so to speak, while here, her whole hand is swallowed up in the wizard's sleeve of a formal gown. But what does it mean to classify a work as pretentious when it is a product of unquestionably serious scholarship and learning? Normally, to be pretentious means to allude to knowledge you do not know. I detect two main strands of it in this work. Firstly, there is her ebullient over-interpretations. A textbook example appears on page twenty six, where Carson reads Sappho fragment 105a as if the extant condition of the verse was in every linguistic detail deliberate and meaningful. What’s wrong with such a thorough close reading you ask? What else should we do but give our classical poets the benefit of the doubt and assume that every minute morphologic inflection carried meaning? Well, firstly there’s a sense in which such violent deconstructions seem more like a demonstration of the critic’s fluency with the quasi-scientific terminology of linguistics than an attempt to understand what the source might have meant, and then secondly, good intentions not being everything, there’s a kind of hubris in offering such microscopic analysis: you imply that Sappho needs your linguistic abilities to be fully understood, and that, indeed, Sappho wouldn’t fully understand herself until you came along and articulated what she really meant. Lastly, Carson’s speculative comparisons between variances in prosody and movements of the heart were once a staple of my own excited undergraduate essays and, in my view, that’s where they should happily remain. Any time you feel tempted to compare metric deviations to the rhythm of something more intimate, compare it to a brisk walk instead. It's usually just as good.
To state this is not to opt for conservative readings of the classics. The second pretention in this essay is its failure to live up to the questions it poses. On the one hand, it tantalises us with the prospect of uncovering a theory of love which is based on triangulation, but in practice it retreats into academic arguments about the perspectival position of the lover in relation to the beloved in a way that, for this reader at least, is unsatisfying, and annoyingly coy. In a work tastefully kitted-out with references to brand-name French poststructuralists, namely, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, there’s not much by way of radical theories of the subject. In Carson, love is a three-way only insofar as we might occasionally imagine feeling pleasantly uncomfortable when someone eyes up our would-be partner, and if things do get difficult, there’s always the semantics of ‘eros’ to ponder over and bide time. Anyone hoping to find a Pierre Klossowski style ‘theory of hospitality’ replete with pretty illustrations from classical literature will be disappointed, and not bittersweetly. And Carson’s reticence, to me, misses out on a chance to explore what might have been a far more radically alternative notion of love in the ancient Greek world.
Having said all this, Carson’s essay is commendable in its near total lack of moral censure for any human expressions of love. Nor does it court academics who would prefer to believe their research matters in proportion to the amount of political indignation they can legitimately muster, in the what might be termed the ‘now you've done your close reading, you can have your complaint’ school of tepid politicised journalism masking itself as literary analysis. If politics does still seep into Carson’s essay, then perhaps it comes from her inimitable voice, which implies a certain relation to the world which values sensitivity, wide-learning, honesty, and a certain sanguinity of temperament which makes studying the classics seem like a heroic, intrinsically worthwhile endeavour. And if, after the thorough breakdown of Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’ in the book's concluding chapters, Carson doesn’t quite live up to the Herculean task of drawing together the love of wooing with the love of knowledge, one never gets the impression she’s been wasting your time. -
"La necesidad de expresar el deseo amoroso, el placer y el dolor simultáneo que provoca, todavía es, hoy en día, uno de los lugares comunes de la literatura. El amor erótico, aquel que desea lo que no tiene, que existe tan solo como estado transitorio entre querer y tener, parece único para quien lo está experimentando, sea o no la primera vez, y es universal para quien está libre de él. El carácter individualizador y paradójico de Eros ha influido en que sea uno de los temas más importantes en la historia, tanto artística como filosófica, de la cultura occidental. Actualmente, el término se define simplemente como «amor» o «impulso sexual», pero ¿cuándo apareció por primera vez? ¿Qué significaba en sus inicios? ¿Cómo se ha ido transformando el concepto a lo largo del tiempo?
En este ensayo de 1986, originalmente titulado Eros el agridulce, Anne Carson hace un análisis exhaustivo de la figura de Eros partiendo de los textos clásicos griegos. El estudio de la poeta abarca temas como la escritura, la imaginación y la metáfora, sin desvincularse nunca del concepto de deseo. Carson es capaz de establecer lazos firmes entre lo concreto y lo abstracto y consigue unir a autores separados por siglos: de Safo y Arquíloco a Woolf y Welty. El ensayo es una muestra de su profundo conocimiento de la cultura clásica, su rigor filosófico, y su talento para la palabra escrita. La autora logra hacer un trabajo académico cuidadoso sin dejar de lado su estilo como poeta. El resultado es un texto analítico pero accesible e incluso, por momentos, intimista. Tratándose del tema del que se trata y escribiéndolo quien lo escribe, la combinación es lógica y bienvenida. Carson hace resurgir a Eros en toda su complejidad volviendo a sus inicios, y nos recuerda que todo tópico fue, tiempo atrás, original". Ada Bruguera -
Do you know how what we call "love," came to be? Anne Carson does. She examines the nuances of love, through the lens of Greek fragments and culture. Her chapter titles: "Ruse," "Tactics," "The Reach," pars out the subtleties of desire with all its paradoxical underpinnings. If you've ever wondered if your lover was playing a "game," read this book to understand the impossibility and awesome responsibility for wanting what you want, denying it so you can eventually enjoy it, and where honesty truly lies. (Pun intended.)
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ihan sairaaaaaaan hyvä kirjotan tästä jotain kunhan luen uuestaan… työläs lukea mutta sen arvoinen… tää maailmankatsomus >>>
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I was in pain when I read this. Wanted a guide to the mysteries of love and lovepain and Carson had just cracked me open with
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. (What was Kafka's thing about a great book cracking open the ice berg of the soul? Wait... let me look for it: "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.") So I wanted more. More insight. More guides to the mysteries. But this book wasn't that. This book, instead of being a guide, instead of being Beatrice, is Humbert Humbert mansplaining about obsessions only tangentially about love; mainly about obsessions from the classical world and riffs and plays on antecedent books about love and pain. In particular, Carson wants to write an update to Barthes'
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, but this is not that.
What does she argue? It's been a month since I read the book, so I don't really remember everything that well, but she claims that love is bittersweet, or "sweetbitter" in Sappho's version. Love is about the object of love that exists outside of the lovers, which might be true. It might be the case that what is loved is not really The Other, but an idealized form. Ok, I can live with that. It's roughly Proust's stance and it has some ring of truth. But for me, my love was the friction between what I expected the beloved to say or do and what she actually did. It wasn't an obsession with an ideal, but with a cozy place between her constant surprises and constant familiarity. It wasn't how I remembered her, but how she existed in the world both not what I knew and what I knew.
But Carson also ties everything to writing, as a writer is apt to do. Ties it to reading and language and the alphabet and the mysteries thereof. Really? Because to me the mysteries of reading (and "falling in love with reading") is pretty distinct from falling in love with a person. I mean, as a reader I get what she is getting at. There are occasions when I seem to breath and eat a particular book and that obsession comes slightly near what I feel when I love a person, but still, it's a writer's kick to see everything in terms of writing. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Ok.
I'm in Paris. On vacation, I guess. The so-called "city of love." I'm alone and discombobulated so I'll have to write about this later. But walking in the City of Light / The City of Love and seeing couples happily walking entwined while you walk alone wishing you were with who you loved gets more into the sweetbitter of love than reading a treatise on metaphors in Sappho, Catullus, and Roman rom-coms. -
“Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact. The interaction is a fiction arranged by the mind of the lover. It carries an emotional charge both hateful and delicious and emits a light like knowledge. No one took a more clear-eyed view of this matter than Sappho.”
What must it be like to have Anne Carson’s mind? What does she think about while eating breakfast or tying her shoelaces? Perhaps eros and every shade of its meaning from Sappho to the present, perhaps even more. I couldn’t help but feel like this beautiful, perfect little book of criticism was just skimming the surface of Carson’s genius. It is a sublimely measured and controlled bit of literary theory, exploring why eros has been the motivating force of poets and writers since the beginning of recorded literature. So compelling. An important little volume for writers and readers.
He seems to me equal to gods that man
who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me, all greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
(Sappho, Fragment 31) -
Med stöd av ingående analyser av arkaiska dikter (av Sapfo, Sofokles, Aristoteles, Platon m.fl) argumenterar Dillard för att det bitterljuva Eros (begär) innefattar 1. jag 2. det jag begär och 3. hinder. Hon avhandlar också hur Eros förhåller sig till skrivandet och läsandet, genom att fokusera det grekiska språket.
Det jag begrep uppskattade jag mycket. Förkunskaper krävs!
Eros=begär=ett verb= brist/hinder=en gud
Man begär endast något man inte kan få.
Det krävs ett fönster mellan jaget och det begärda. Om fönstret öppnas försvinner begäret.
Eros som en iskristall i handen. Den smälter oavsett om du håller den kvar eller försöker släppa den och kvar finns din kalla blöta hand.
Eros som efemär, paradox, ouppnåelig, närmast ett begär efter begäret. -
Το βιβλίο με συγκλόνισε, με ανατρίχιασε, με σκίρτησε. Περιγράφει με τρόπο εξαιρετικά τρυφερό την αμφιρρέπεια του Έρωτα και την επώδυνα γλυκιά του απαρχή, την Επιθυμία.
"Η εξήγηση εντοπίζει τρεις γωνίες: τον ερωτευμένο, τον ερώμενο και τον ερωτευμένο που επαναπροσδιορίζεται ως λειψός δίχως τον ερώμενο."
Πάντα και παντού αυτή η τριγωνική κατάσταση: το γνωστό μέρος, το δυνητικό μέρος-άρα και άγνωστο ακόμα και η πρόθεση σύζευξης αυτών των δύο στην αιωνιότητα, αφού συνειδητοποιείται πρώτα η διαφορά τους. Εκεί, στην τελευταία, ορίζεται και εγκαθιδρύεται και ο Έρωτας ως η απαράμιλλη προσπάθεια σύνδεσής τους. -
Lately I keep getting the feeling that I am being guided by some external force or fate, and it's a feeling both delightful and deeply disturbing. This book is the epitome of that -- so many of the ideas that have occupied my mind for the last two months (love, John Keats, Sappho and the Greek Anthology poets, Troilus and Criseyde, Las Meninas, Greek urns, Plato's Phaedrus, identity and difference, and semiotics) come together here in a masterful and impassioned work of scholarship that I only happened to pick up on a whim.
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¡Empezamos bien el año! Pese a ser un ensayo complejo y que utiliza referencias bastante desconocidas para mí, la forma en la que Anne Carson va tejiendo sus ideas hace que todo parezca muy sencillo. No es para nada tedioso, todo lo contrario. Y mientras leía no podía parar de pensar lo inteligente que es esta mujer.
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Heerlijke deep dive in het begrip ‘eros’ in klassieke - vooral Oudgriekse- literatuur.
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I teach from this book also. It's a fantastic read for anyone who enjoys language and thinking about the time when written language first appeared for the Greeks, and they thought it was a dangerous new technology that would destroy intellectual life.
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"(...) o desejo é um movimento que carrega corações ansiosos daqui para lá, lançando a mente para dentro de uma história. na cidade sem desejo, esses voos são inimagináveis. as asas são mantidas cortadas. o conhecido e o desconhecido aprendem a se alinhar um atrás do outro para que, desde que posicionados num ângulo adequado, pareçam ser a mesma coisa (...) buscar algo a mais do que os fatos vai te levar para além desta cidade e talvez, como para Sócrates, para além deste mundo."
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tucking this in the same pocket of my mind as a lover's discourse.
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Anne Carson discovers edging:
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Listen. I might not always agree with Dr. Carson—in fact I often disagree with her (I think the main reason Sappho referred to Eros as ‘sweetbitter’ instead of ‘bittersweet’ was because Ancient Greek is a different language than Modern English)—but god is she eloquent. One of the most enjoyable scholars I’ve ever read.
One really fun thing to do is try to find all the references Dr. Carson includes in their original form. For example, a brief paragraph at the beginning of ‘Logic at the Edge’:I-III. When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons. “A hole is being gnawed in [my] vitals” says Sappho (LP, fr. 96.16-17).
Translated, that citation refers to fragment 96 in the Lobel–Page numbering (Voigt 96; Diehl 98), lines 16-17*:πόλλα δὲ ζαφοίταισ’ ἀγάνας ἐπι- / μνάσθεισ’ Ἄθτιδος ἰμέρῳ / λέπταν ποι φρένα κῆρ δ’ ἄσα βόρηται·
many [πολύς] | and [δέ] | wander, roam [ζαφοίταισα, διαφοιτάω] | mild, gentle [ἀγανός] | on- [ἐπι-]
remind, remember [μνάσθεις, μνησθεῖσα, μιμνῄσκω, μιμνήσκω] | Atthis [Ἀτθίς] | desire, yearning [ἵμερος]
? [λεπτόν?] | somewhither [ποι] | mind, heart [φρήν] | heart [κῆρ] | and [δέ] | distress, longing, desire, nausea [ἄση] | weigh down [βαρέω]IV. “You have snatched the lungs out of my chest” (West, IEG 191) and “pierced me right through the bones” (193) says Archilochos.
‘West, IEG 191’ is Iambi et elegi Graeci, edited by Martin Litchfield West, 191.“You have worn me down” (Alkman 1.77 PMG),
“grated me away” (Ar., Eccl. 956),
“devoured my flesh” (Ar., Ran. 66),
Aristophanes, Frogs.“sucked my blood” (Theokritos 2.55),
“mowed off my genitals” (?Archilochos, West, IEG 99.21),
“stolen my reasoning mind” (Theognis 1271).
Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less. This attitude toward love is grounded for the Greeks in oldest mythical tradition: Hesiod describes in his Theogony how castration gave birth to the goddess Aphrodite, born from the foam around Ouranos’ severed genitals (189-200). Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons.
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*
See also.
This is the source I primarily use when quoting Sappho online. Tragically, neither my laptop nor my phone have Aeolic Greek as a keyboard option, so typing the original lines is more trouble than it's worth, especially when I have the ability to copy-paste the appropriate text.
