History creates more legends than imagination, and artists feed on its fruit in a cycle fueled by passions, such as the love and passion that Sappho embodied in her work more than 2,000 years ago and that now Christina Rosenvinge recovers in Los versos sáficos, between pop and folklore, between electronics and the lyre. To talk about Sappho is to talk about classical Greece, about Aphrodite and Titonos, about the library of Alexandria and the fury of Pope Gregory VII, who ordered his manuscripts burned because he considered them immoral. A whirlwind of centuries at the heart of which are hidden sweetly crafted verses that could well pass for a pop song.
“When I started making the songs, I found that I didn’t have to play a lot of Sappho because her poetry is very concise, with few metaphors, very few flourishes, very simple images that work in a very beautiful way”, he explains in conversation telefónica Rosenvinge, who undertook the project as a continuation of the play Sappho, which he devised for the Merida festival. The Madrid singer had already faced the challenge of setting poems to music in the past, but she found herself “with too many words, she couldn’t shave those words off the poet”. The opposite happens with Safo, “even in the complete poems you find a conciseness and a very pure story, if you think about the Poem of the passion, it’s a pop song that could be by Lana del Rey”.
Rosenvinge recognizes that the work to unite the archaic with the present has been “surprisingly easy”, it is not for nothing that lyrical poetry was born sung, “it is before writing, it was expressed orally accompanied by a lyre, that is which was formally a song”. The fact that Safo’s work has arrived so fragmented (only 10% of his verses are preserved) has given the Madrid artist an extra freedom that is reflected in his themes, in which he moves from rock to lieder to for electronics, “yes, written in Sapphic stanzas”, combinations of hendecasyllable verses with a tail pentasyllable written in Aeolian Greek that become themes that “could exist in the Spanish songbook”, such as Canción de boda, or in the same Rosenvinge repertoire, such as Ligera como el aire.
Over the centuries, the figure of Sappho fell into mystery and mythology, “once dead she became a character that was used in operas and stories. Ovid invented a tragic death for him, a suicide for love of a man, which is a betrayal of his lesbian poetry, in which it is clear that he desired women and not men”. Oblivion – contrary to what happened with previous works such as the Iliad or the Odyssey – did not manage to bury the fact that in her time the poet of Lesvos was widely imitated, and established a canon that reached the poets romans
It wasn’t until the 19th century that avant-garde poets like Ezra Pound recovered the work of the Greek, and turned its fragmentation into a positive value. Rosenvinge compares what has happened in poetry to Rodin’s incomplete sculptures, which imitated the fragments recovered from the classical period. “In ancient times these torsos were completed because it was not considered that a torso alone had meaning, but Rodin turns it into a motif in itself, the incomplete achieves all its artistic power”. And among the incomplete, Sappho rose from her ashes, “a wonderful revenge that makes her the most modern”.
“I come from a Protestant culture, the education I received was more Spartan than Sapphic, more based on sacrifice, duty and austerity than pleasure and hedonism”, explains Rosenvinge when compared to Sappho, who in her verses sings of desire and non-reproductive sex. “Singing to the pleasure of women remains revolutionary even today. We started talking about feminine pleasure very recently”, and when we talk about it, a link with the sapph emerges, especially in early adolescence, “not only in the question of liquid sexuality, but in the connection with what it’s sensory”.
