Sappho. How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality. Edited and translated by Sarah Nooter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
In the words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queer “can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”
Eros is above all a feeling so powerful that it is understood as divine, an affective force that draws people away from what is demanded of them by institutions and establishments, and toward an experience of fervent vitality.
A delicate fire
runs under my skin, my eyes
see nothing, my ears
roar,
cold sweat pours down me, and trembling
seizes me all over, and I am greener than grass.
A boy and a horse have a similar mind. For a horse
does not weep when his rider lies in the dust,
but just carries another man, once glutted on fodder.
For whoever labors for the love of a boy must, in essence,
put his hand over a quickly burning flame.
Blessed is he who, in love with a boy, does not know the sea,
and for whom night coming over the ocean is not a care.
For the vision of the mind begins to look sharp only when that of the eyes starts to abate from its peak.