Derek Mahon: XIII: Sappho in ‘Judith’s Room’

Allusion to Classical figure Cydro, Gongula, Anactoria, Aphrodite, Pleiades, Plato, Alcaeus. Sappho is transformed into a modern Poet-Muse, speaking to her fellow authors in a New York feminist bookstore.

Allusion to classical place The Underworld (‘the dead kingdom’), Mytilene

Relationship to Classical text See below, under ‘Translation’.

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts ‘Aphrodite, weaver of intrigue...[etc.]’ is a reworking of lines from Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite (fragment 1) and the poem contains numerous other references to the Sapphic fragments (e.g. ‘A corps of men, a list of ships’ refers to fr.16, ‘meadows of brine and dew’ to fr.96). As Haughton points out, Mahon elides reworkings of quotations from Terence’s play Heauton Timorumenos (humani nil a me alienum puto) and Ovid’s Tristia, book II.i (Quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas) in the lines ‘‘Nothing was alien to me, nothing inhuman:/ what did I teach but the love of women?’. (See p.251 in H. Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.) Mahon also borrows from Ovid’s ‘Sappho to Phaon’, from his Heroides, in the references to Cydro and Alceus.

Classical/post-Classical intertexts ‘Sure I’ve been down to the dead kingdom to hear/ the grim statistics’ is a mocking reference to Eavan Boland’s poem ‘The Journey’, in which Sappho acts as poet-guide to Boland in the Underworld. (E. Boland, The Journey. Manchester: Carcanet, 1987.)

Further Comment Mahon imitates Sappho’s Greek in his use of compound adjectives, such as soft-petal’d, dove-drawn and sea-girt, and in the divine epithet ‘weaver of intrigue’.