Anna Braga’s Reviews > After Sappho > Status Update

Ancient Greek has a singular and a plural, as in other languages. But there is also the dual, which is used for two things that naturally occur together: twins, a pair of turtle doves, breasts, the two halves of a walnut in one shell. Do you see? Eleonora asked Isadora, looking up from the Greek grammar that lay open between them. Only for two things that embrace each other. As when you sleep in my arms, my sweet.

“In fact the fixity of some things was the cover for others. For example, there was an extreme reticence in the nineteenth century when describing women together. The English dictionaries used shy Greek terms, or omitted the possibility entirely. Only the criminologists wanted to discuss it, and only in order to chronicle the interiors of insane asylums, brothels, and unnatural mothers.”

“A poet is someone who stands on the door sill and sees the room before her as a sea whose waves she might dive through. (…) A poet is someone who swims inexplicably away from the shore, only to arrive at an island of her own invention.”