“Language became a salve to longing.” So writes Australian singer and musician Nick Cave in A Lecture on Love Songs. He is writing about the death of his father.
This may seem a strange beginning to a lecture on love. But Nick Cave knows that at the heart of the love song is loss and ache. Not just the pain of death, be it parent or lover, but the seemingly unendurable pain of loss.
The Greek poet, Sappho, from the island of Lesvos, knew this, too. Thousands of years before Nick Cave, Sappho sings of how pain drips (Fragment 31). These words are mere scraps, just one example of her many fragmented poems I’ve translated, full of gaps, characterised by the presence – or absence – of a poet stopped mid-sentence. We are meant to lament the loss of her complete oeuvre and to celebrate the handful of intact poems, but I’m grateful this one didn’t survive. This fragment says it all.
Love & loss in ancient Greece
Sappho loved and lost and loved again. We all do. The ancient Greeks, including Sappho, were aware of the pain of romance — but they couldn’t resist the next pursuit, the next round of pain. And it’s this inevitability that keeps poetic inspiration on fire, giving us some of our most sublime love songs.
The inevitability of loving and losing frightened the Greeks, who strove to contain their emotions, lest they succumb to madness. Nick Cave also speaks about this potential for insanity when it comes to love, channelling bards as old as the Homeric poets who preceded Sappho by around 100 years (c. Eighth Century BCE). These were the men who sang of the Trojan War, the most famous of all ancient legends, which tells of Paris’ desire for Helen, the pair fleeing her home in Sparta, and their arrival in his home in Troy. The message: love unchecked cannot only lead to the most irrational of actions, it can also lead to war.
We find more than an echo of these sentiments in A Lecture on Love Song:
“The Love Song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane, for the Love Song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.”
Love in the Trojan War
It’s the same for the two epic poems of the Trojan War, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are, in many ways, love songs.
Born from the erotic madness of Paris and Helen, they gift us the stories of Achilles’ rageful pain at the loss of his companion, Patroclus, who dies on the battlefield of Troy; Zeus’ romps with his wife, Hera, on a deliciously fertile patch of grass; and Odysseus’ forlorn longing to return to his wife, Penelope (amid some indiscretions along the way).
But arguably the most heart wrenching paean to the love song in these Homeric tales are the words of Andromache, wife of the Trojan prince, Hector, who laments his death at the hands of Achilles.
In Andromache’s lament, we hear from a war widow, a young woman, a mother of a baby boy, whose words remind us that the love song and its pain have a broad reach, from which no one can escape. Andromache mourns her husband with a timeless sense of loss and longing:
“you did not die in bed, stretching your arms to me,
you did not leave a final, intimate word that would stay with me forever”
(Homer, Iliad 24.743-744; trans. Johnson).
Many Greek love songs — for they were sung, like those of Nick Cave — are about loss, separation, death and madness. Sappho, again, often sung the same songs, lamenting being parted from the women she loved, and sometimes evoking desire as an erotic pathology. In one fragment, she evokes the power of erôs, such an intense, sometimes mindless, sexual desire, that the Greeks also personified it as a god:
“Eros the limb- loosener yet again shakes me to the core,
the sweetly- bitter, utterly irresistible little beast.”
(Sappho, Fragment 130; trans. Johnson)
As for the madness often expressed in love songs, still familiar today, Sappho, in an often-quoted fragment, sings of her physical reaction at the sight of a beautiful woman. Indeed, she is so entranced that she believes she is at the point of death:
“sweat pours down me, a tremor
shakes me, I am more greenish
than grass, and I think that I am on
the very point of dying.”
(Sappho, Fragment 31, 13-16; trans. Johnson)
Nick Cave describes some of his love songs, including I Let Love In, Into My Arms, and Straight to You, as his “gloomy, violent, dark-eyed children”. We are the recipients of both poets’ sad children, recognising in them a familiar ache. We play their verses over and over, we sing along, we heed their warnings, yet somehow, inevitably, we will all surrender one more time to “the sweetly-bitter, utterly irresistible little beast.”
