Reviewed by Anette Horn - Südafrika - Kapstadt   Sarah Ruden's debut collection of exquisitely crafted poems is steeped in the classical tradition of ancient Greece and Rome. Her delicate and elegant adaptations of such poets as Sappho and Alcman attest as much to her own fine poetic sensibility as to the splendour of the original, as far as this can be gleaned from the tattered manuscripts that survive today. It is here that the poetic imagination takes over from classical philology. Ruden combines the best of both worlds, as she holds a PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard, and boasts as her poetic mentor none other than this year's Noble Prize laureate, Seamus Heaney.   Ruden tries to make the ancient poems speak to the modern-day reader by translating their underlying „poetic event" into the present. She succeeds particularly in her recreations of Sappho's fragments, where the intense lyrical beauty of the words have not faded and once again transport the complex emotional currents of their speakers.   In an uncanny way, Ruden's own poetic concerns mirror those of Sappho. Although Sappho, like her contemporary Alkaios, was banished by the tyrant Melanchros from her home island, Lesbos, between 603 and 595 B.C., and moved to Syracuse, she never refers to the circumstances of her banishment or to the political upheavals of her time. These are vividly depicted by Alkaios, whose brothers participated in deposing Melanchros, paving the way for the return of the exiles. Instead Sappho paints a peaceful, harmonious world, yet her poetry is not a glass-bead game. Ruden, while not being banished from her home in the USA, has been translated into a world of transitional upheaval and violence, which does not seem to ripple the smooth surface of her verse.   When Sappho eventually returned to Lesbos, she started a school for young girls from her house, where they acquired the refined manners, elegance of dress and musical skills that were expected of noble women. Interestingly, women played a significant part in this culture while men went out to war. Sappho's students were sought especially at weddings, where they arranged the festivities. This is why wedding songs play such an important role in Sappho's work. The fragments of Sappho's wedding songs that remain, sparkle with an ethereal grace, in spite of their traditional motifs and plain language. More often than not these weddings were sad occasions for Sappho, as she gave away one of her beloved students. It was rumoured that Sappho had lesbian tendencies, but her relationship with her students seem to have been erotic rather than sexual. Ruden uses Sappho's favored metaphor of the apple for the young bride in her recreation of a wedding song, After Sappho's Verses on the Marriage of a Friend: The surface of a stream, aflame with motes, An amulet, a painting bright on glass, Hard softness like a dreaming stone, you float Above the festival, above the breach In sunlit air and noises of the dance: The apple that the harvest could not reach. (p. 20) Ruden brilliantly evokes the young girl's beauty in these verses, which sets her apart from the other girls: she is both ethereal and corporeal. Yet the reference to the „apple that the harvest could not reach" is a gentle reminder of the bride's age. The next two stanzas elaborate on the separation brought on by time and death. The tone of the poem imperceptibly shifts from joy to grief. In the third stanza the apple tree motif is inverted: And then the apple tree contrives Some crinkled silk, and grief on grief Embroiders it with brown and red: Precious, discarded thing, a leaf. But Ruden/Sappho refuses to end the poem on a note of despair. Instead she resolves to accept her fate: Whatever happens, happens here, And everything is here today. Let go my hand, and understand I will not stop this, and I will not look away. Sappho delighted in the „luxury" or fullness of life, which she found both in humans and in nature. It is corroborated by her belief in the Greek gods and goddesses. Although Sappho could not simply turn to religion in her moments of despair, her religious background provided her world with an inherent order.   This sense of order also permeates Ruden's collection of poems, translated into a perfect sense for the intricacies of rhythm and a perfectly natural handling of rhyme. It is underpinned by a belief in Christianity, as well as the timelessness of the Classics. She speaks with a serenity that is, however, achieved at the price of the more spontaneous impulses of life. In Coming to Germany (p. 34) a kiss breaks the pact between the speaker and her partner. This disturbance causes the lyrical „I" to reflect on the connectedness of everything, which she calls „God" .Although the doubt flickers in her mind, „What is impossible is God, I know -", it is cast aside as „our vanity, our words, and our desire -" in favour of the ultimate assertion, „And He is God, the end of everything, / Even of thinking and remembering."   It is this quietistic renunciation of both earthly pleasure and pain which is at once admirable and stifling. Stifling, because it suppresses the Dionysian drives on which any rational order rests. Nietzsche pointed this out when he questioned Winckelmann's notion of the ancient Greeks as adherents of the harmonious „golden mean" .Perhaps we should heed his call to read the Classics against the grain, by drawing attention to the slavery, the bloody wars and the violent passions on which this culture was based, lest we idealise the atrocities that are committed in the name of culture today. Only then can we appreciate the beauty and the tenuousness of these exquisite poetic achievements. Sappho was very much aware of the dark world of Eros, when she wrote: „Again the limb-loosening Eros shakes me,/ bitter-sweet, untamable, a dark animal."   Anette Horn