#slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl

[sparrow-the-tired-lesbian]

sometimes I forget not everyone is attracted to women and realize they don’t understand the appeal of the soft and warm tiddy

[kenniex2]

Nojiko 👉🏾👈🏾🥺

[lelianasbong]

i love sera's gigglesnort laugh.... it's so charming and bright. love her cadence and verbiage and the way her voice goes low and husky when she flirts. love to hear her talk for hours about anything.

[isfjella]

swōtī mōdēr, ne kann webaną, hwandê lubōlīkō Frawjǭ mek midi langōndē furi kwēnį habaiþi uberkumanaz.

[girlivealwaysbean]

people are flirting under my post am i aphrodite 💅

[lgbtcorp]

@geniuscorp: the odds are definitely in your favour out there - probably not batting for the same team, but you never know. go forth and conquer. i know you want to.

it's strange, coming from him. Iex has never been blind — he has a woman on each arm at the best of times, and college has been particularly fruitful for him in that respect. IiIIian keeps them busy, tugged by the tailcoat into this week's big event (a charity gala for one of her pet projects is what she's been able to gleam — angling for a fifty thousand dollar grant means involving only the most boring and hideous of old white men. this has become their everyday now.)

she's off to the side, trying to blend by the bar in the hopes that, if she sits up straight enough, and commands herself with the same self-assuredness that andrea'd drilled into her for the past three years, she'll get served more than a shirley fucking temple. (jesus, she misses her. a stupid, primal miss that comes with the lipstick stain on her glass, and the top-shelf scotch speaking to her from across the bar. boarding school is rough when the rojases camp out in buenos aires for the summer, leaving her living through letters and scrawled quips in the footnotes).

he's behind her before she even knows it's happening. eighteen is a weird age — old enough to be out of the house, churning her way through reams upon reams of stuffy textbooks and collegiate frat parties, but not old enough to escape IiIIian's ever-present claws.

the bartender looks sweet. she smiles when she places the napkin down and adds an extra orange peel to Iena's old fashioned, and it gets her thinking. which gets her staring. which seems to be Iex's perfect in.

the odds are definitely in your favour out there.

out where? behind the bar? or shifted through the revolving door of wait staff and caterers that mother revels in abusing?

"oh, please. i'd tell her my name and she'd go running." she suffers through a sip — too many bitters — and watches as the bartender muscles a cork out of a particularly expensive bottle of chateau margaux. "what's the point? you know as well as i do what mother would think."

[kozukihiyori]

Sweet mother, I cannot weave – slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl. - Sappho

[evyltalks]

Sweet mother, I cannot weave -

slender Aphrodite has overcome me

with longing for a girl.

— Sappho

[scarlettgauthor]

Sweet mother, I am weaving like my life fucking depends on it - slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl, and I REALLY want to impress her with this shit.

[otherwisetomato]

Sweet mother, I cannot weave-

Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl

- Sappho

[laughter-lovingworshipper]

This blog is to keep track of my experience with Lady Aphrodite, Goddess of love and beauty

Sweet mother, I cannot weave – slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl. —Sappho

My name is Sappho, but you can also call me Caine, I use they/them pronouns! I'm using this blog as some kind of digital diary and I'm a beginner at this whole Hellenism thing so please give me tips and stuff like that! And please be nice to me!

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

phil’s minute long jake gyllenhaal rant is so lesbian of him expect a sapphic rant in response to “is [this female celebrity] hot” would go like “she is the sun and the stars. she hung the moon. her voice is a song and her movements are a dance. ne’er i saw true beauty til this night. her eyes hold the secrets of the sky and the sea and all of life’s mysteries. i want to give her everything she could ever want. she walks in beauty like the night. slender aphrodite has overcome me with longings for a girl. all who look upon her must bow their heads in respect and admiration, for they have glimpsed something ethereal. goddess, nymph, perfect divine. i hope someone brings her flowers first thing in the morning every single day.”

[noh07]

i love sappho :3

"γλύκηα μᾶτερ, οὔτοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἴστονπόθῳ δάμεισα παῖδος βραδίναν δι᾽ Ἀφροδίταν"

- sappho

"sweet mother, I cannot weave — slender aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl" (accurate translation by diane rayor)

"no mom, I can't knit, I'm gay!" (very loose translation by me)

[lgbtcorp]

lena, at any given point: [yearning in one way or another]

[specialagentartemis]

I’ve been reading If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, a translation of Sappho’s poetry by Anne Carson, and last night came upon one I had been VERY curious about how she would approach:

The book. Fragment 102. On the left, two lines of Greek text:

Γλύκηα μᾶτερ, οὔ τοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἴστον πόθῳ δάμεισα παῖδος βραδίναν δι’ Ἀφροδίταν.

And on the right, Anne Carson’s translation:

sweet mother I cannot work the loom I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite

I, of course, being Too Online that I am, am more familiar with this translation, by Diane J. Rayor:

Sweet mother, I cannot weave– slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl.

So of course I wondered, What Is The Truth? Anne Carson provides lots of end-notes on word usage and historical context, but was fully and uncharacteristically silent on this one.

When looking into it, the word Sappho used for the object of her longing is παῖδος, paîdos, which is most commonly translated as “youth” because it’s not gendered. It can mean either a boy or a girl.

So, whether Sappho is overcome by Aphrodite with longing for a boy or for a girl is, in fact, translator’s choice. (There are reasons besides heteronormative assumptions for translating it as “boy”—though the word is not gendered, it’s cognate with a lot of words like puer that mean “son” so may have had a more masculine-as-default assumption (like a lot of European languages do), and when Sappho wrote about young women, the word she commonly used was παρθένος parthénos “young woman, maiden, virgin.” But paîs/paîdos it is not a gendered word and could be translated either way!) 

And honestly now I appreciate the cleverness of ones who find workarounds to avoid gendering the one she’s longing for, to be more honest to what she actually wrote. 

[tobbogan-13]

“Sweet mother, I cannot weave- Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl”

guys Sappho originated being too gay to function