
StartleResponse.com, ever curious about creative process, engages here with the culturally generous Chris Mason and Mark Jickling, whose Old Songs translated and set to music in 2024 a beguiling gathering of Sappho’s poetic fragments. Many Sapphos is a little bit folk, a little bit rock ’n’ roll, and a good deal of cross-era raucousness.
An overwhelming miasma of speculation surrounds Sappho’s life and work. Some scholars propose that a mere seven percent of Sappho’s writing survives1. Theories abound concerning whether Latin and Greek religious authorities destroyed her writing based on assumptions about her sexual orientation, medieval copyists neglected the work out of ignorance of Sappho’s specific dialect of Greek2, or Sappho herself set the work ablaze amid dangerously intense passions3.
StartleResponse.com contemplates whether culture clings to the remaining shards not only because they represent lyric accomplishment and arresting beauty but also because they inspire provocative fantasies about what the past was and what the present could be. The struggle for creative expression and basic individual freedoms apparently speaks across time.
In the spirit of the continuous revisiting of Sappho’s razor-thin survival and persistent significance among scholars and lovers of language, StartleResponse.com poses to Chris and Mark the question, “Why is Sappho’s time the present?”
Chris: Sappho, like Archilochus a generation before her, seems to have written poetry inspired by her experiences and feelings. As opposed to the Homeric epics which related the stories of the culture at large. Because she wrote of personal experiences and feelings with such intensity and such beauty, the words have seemed to exist in an almost magical present tense to readers at many different times, including now.
Mark: Her time is now because she understands all the pulleys and levers of our hearts.
StartleResponse.com: Chris and Mark, might I be so bold to assert that Many Sapphos is a departure from Old Songs’ preceding recording Callimachus in that it intermittently undercuts expectation with driving rock guitar, bass, modern percussion and a diversity of women’s voices. I remain haunted by the acoustic “freak folkishness,” along with Liz Downing’s otherworldly solos, in Callimachus, but what I hear in Many Sapphos is an “indie” soundtrack I would expect to accompany a Hal Hartley, Sarah Polley or Sofia Coppola film. The harmonies and solos that the women and you, Chris, perform contemporize the ancient chorus and balladeer.
Talk about this shift from the previous project and your very special gathering of musicians.
Mark: The thing about Callimachus is that he was literate and learned, writing imitations of much older poets, so that it’s impossible to get a sense of what really mattered to him, versus what was an academic exercise. With Sappho, you hear an unmistakeable individual voice, even in the microscopic fragments we use for this album.
Chris: We wanted to revisit Sappho and write songs from fragments that are lesser known and that we hadn’t worked with before. Many of them are difficult to understand because of their very, very fragmentary nature. We also decided to try a more electric accompaniment, a “psychedelic Sappho” as opposed to our original “old-timey Sappho.” We recruited 6 wonderful singers as well as a great drummer, Chris Ciattei, many of them from the Shakemore scene. This goes along with the title Many Sapphos, which alludes to the many different ideas of who Sappho was.
StartleResponse.com: Back in the day I took a class with C. K. Williams and Rick Davis on “translation.” In the class we did not translate from original texts but rather drafted versions of translated works, such as Seamus Heaney’s translation of The Cure at Troy. In retrospect, I appreciate how the class provoked questions about interpretation and the nuances of diction. Your translations clearly break with the cold severity of some traditional translations of the fragments and offer bursts of playfulness, hilarity, poignancy and despair.
I’m struck by how your highly specific language evokes, for example, a congerie of elites at the “Wedding Party.” “Uncrowned” might be my favorite, for its talk of:
in Hades House
you will wander
among dark shapes
invisible
And then in “Dissing,” we encounter the sort of banter the Real Housewives might dish out. Apparently, Greece in the 6th century BC was as tough as 21st century upper class NYC, with cohorts claiming no one was “more bothersome than you.”
On the flip side, we go to the country to meet “Farm Girl”:
What farm girl charms you
Wearing farmers’ clothes
She doesn’t pull her ragged dress
Over her ankles
Over her ankles
Please discuss your approach to translation and what your selection of fragments represented for you in the making of this recording.
Chris: I read the original to feel the music and hear the sounds that Sappho spoke. Then, because I didn’t start studying Ancient Greek until I was 50, I use lexicons and scholarly works to make sure I understand it correctly. When I am working on an English version, I develop the English translation and the melody at the same time, so that the music and the words influence each other and come together naturally as a song.
Mark: In Old Songs we’ve never approached a project with a predetermined theme, as if we were to say, “OK, let’s do all the songs about weddings.” We just pick fragments that appeal to us for whatever reason. Chris and I work independently at translation (other than occasionally correcting each others’ mistakes). Usually, I start by making a prose version in English. When I have several translated fragments in my head, I start playing an instrument until I hit on a musical phrase that seems to work with a line of one of the texts. Then I tweak the translation until the rest of the text matches the tune. Sometimes it goes in the other direction: I find a melody I like, and then set about producing a translation that fits that meter.
My general view of translation is that whatever principles you have going into a project, you will abandon them to get the job done.
StartleResponse.com: In contemporary Greece, a group of women vocalists who call themselves The Stray Bitches (https://adespoteskyles.blogspot.com/?m=1qw25) still sings the fragments of Sappho. You have sistren on another continent. Wouldn’t you like to jam with them? Which fragment would you most like to offer up in collaboration?

Chris: The wild beauty of The Stray Bitches seems perfect for a festival of Aphrodite or Hera. But as Greek women they would know better than us.
Mark: I would go back to the very beginning of Old Songs, which was: “Evening star brings back/What bright dawn has scattered/Brings back the sheep/Brings back the goats/Brings back the children to their mother.”
StartleResponse.com: Finally, Old Songs has traversed a fair stretch of historical literary terrain in its tenure. When I first heard you at the 14 Karat Cabaret in Baltimore, I felt like I had stepped into a futuristic version of the past. I believe you have changed many audience members’ perceptions of how text can live in the world. Please name some personal highlights of the Old Songs project. And are there slumbering texts yet to revive in song?
Chris: For me the high points have been three different kinds of intense communing. Communing with the text of Sappho and feeling the sounds she produced in her mouth being produced in my mouth. Communing with my fellow musicians Mark and Liz, and many others including those on the new CD. And communing with special audiences including classicists at CUNY, musicians at the Shakemore Festival, and poets at Normals.
I hope there will be more slumbering texts uncovered by archaeologists! We have recorded CDs of all the major archaic Greek lyric poets, but we can always take another look.
Mark: My highlight has been the privilege of hearing Liz Downing channeling Sappho and sending chills up and down my spine. We did two performances as a trio at the Charm City Kitty Club that resulted in three marriages that Liz knows about. What more can you hope for as a musician?
What’s fresher in my mind is the joy in working on Many Sapphos with Katherine Fahey, Heather Dodge, Jennifer Keith, Cindy Brohawn, Liz Boniface and Eva Hendrix. They all took to the archaic like ducks to water! What do we do for a follow-up? I have no idea!

Pictured here: Mark Jickling, Chris Mason, Liz Boniface, Eva Hendrix.
Many Sapphos is available at BandCamp.com: https://oldsongs2.bandcamp.com/album/many-sapphos-2
1Schalansky, Judith. “What We Know of Sappho.” An Inventory of Losses. New Directions: 2020. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/12/08/what-we-know-of-sappho/
2Toth, Peter. “The Mystery of Sappho.” British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: 2017. https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2017/07/the-mystery-of-sappho.html
3ibid. “The destruction of Sappho’s work.” British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: 2017. https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2017/12/the-destruction-of-sapphos-works.html