The Story of Sapho

Modern Language Review, The, Oct, 2004 by Veronique Desnain

The Story of Sapho. By MADELEINE DE SCUDERY. Trans. and intro. by KAREN NEWMAN. (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe) Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2003. xxxi 155 PP. 10 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-226-14399-6.

This volume is an interesting exercise in the play of framing. It contains two texts by Melle de Scudery (one, The Twentieth Harangue, short, the other, The Story of Sapho, about 120 pages long) extracted from much longer works (Artamene, on, Le Grand Cyrus and Les Femmes illustres, on, Les Harangues heroiques) and placed in a carefully defined context. 'The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe' is a series with a strong character. Twenty-eight volumes have already appeared (including ten in the past twelve months); like the others, this one begins with a 'Series Editors' Introduction', which clearly states how the expected reader will approach the text: as an example, made available for the first time to a broad modern audience with a feminist outlook but no critical or theoretical axe to grind, of how writers in the Renaissance (very broadly defined as 'the period 1300-1700' (p. xi)) began the 'call for justice' which was 'the source and origin of the mature feminist tradition and of the realignment of social institutions accomplished in the modern age' (p. xxix). The accompanying bibliographical information and the volume editor's introduction supply further frames within that overall frame, informing and encouraging a specific gender-based historical reading of Melle de Scudery's texts. Certainly, one could see this as reductive, for there are many other contexts within which those texts could be (and have been) productively read; but at least it has the merit of clarity and honesty. This makes no claim to be an edition of the text for the Scudery scholar; rather, it is aiming for an audience who would otherwise doubtless never have read a word by her, in French or in English. Therefore, going by the principles that translation theory has established in recent decades, it seems fair to judge it, not by comparison with an original that remains outside the purview of the target audience, but as an artefact in its own cultural context. Seen thus, I think, in the main it succeeds. On the whole, as the translator hopes, by clarifying (or perhaps supplying) articulations in Scudery's prose, she has created 'a readable English text', though there are moments when one is brought up short by the feeling that over-literal or mis-translation has created a sentence whose logic does not quite work; and the themes of a determined but modest and limited questioning of the virtues allowed to women, brought out in the introduction, as well as the curiously present and yet never explicit sexualization of relations between the characters (male and female), may well be read into the text as it appears. One oddity with which I could not come to grips: it is assumed throughout, it seems, that Scudery's 'Sapho' is not meant to be the same person as the poet Sappho, that she is a 'poetic namesake' (p. 15) rather than a fictional incarnation of a semi-legendary figure; yet there is, it seems to me, endless evidence to suggest the contrary. Scudery's Sapho is indeed a poet, living on Lesbos, peculiarly attached to her female friends, whose male lover has the name associated with her in legend; in short, she is as similar to the traditional Sappho as, say, Racine's Andromaque is to her mythical counterpart. Thus, the historical, ideological, and textual contextualization provided is in some ways open to question; but on its own terms, this volume has its place.

VERONIQUE DESNAIN

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH