Word: sappho
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Hamburg has been patient with Durrell. His first play, Sappho (TIME, Sept. 8, 1961), opened there and ran for all of twelve performances. But Hamburg's theater-minded populace just could not believe that the author of vitally dramatic novels could write twice like a wooden Indian. So Durrell's second play, Act is, was staged there too. It lasted 26 performances...
...find out where Jackie Kennedy and the Onassis yacht Christina were. No one could say. Only the White House was able to keep tabs with a special microwave hookup. Culture-conscious Jackie was charting her own Odyssey, over to Lesbos for a look at the island where the poet Sappho was supposed to have thrown herself into the sea. Then on to Crete for a session with Sister Lee Radziwill, clambering around labyrinthian Minoan ruins. The last stop was at Delphi, where, intent on the guide's words, she stumbled into a pothole. The First Lady quickly scrambled...
...Homer and the Sappho are routine, and the randy-romantic Villon ploddingly pedestrian ("Oh where is last year's snow?"). The quiet golden glow of Leopardi's L'infinito, one of the supreme sonnets in all literature, is messily extinguished; the wild-strawberry innocence of Hebel's Sic Transit acquires a chemical tang of quick-frozen fruitiness; and the fine dandiacal glitter of the Baudelaires is spotted with phraseological mudballs-"this obscene beast," for instance, is scarcely a felicitous rendition of "ce monstre délicat...
Female Oedipus. Since little is known of the poetess Sappho, Durrell follows history as far as it goes, then dives outward into the freedom of his own imagination. In his play, set on the island of Lesbos in 650 B.C., she is the wife of Kreon, a rich landowner who wishes to become the most powerful economic force in the Aeolian world by recovering a set of deeds from his villa in the old city of Eresos, which has disappeared beneath the sea in an earthquake. He wants to use his power to finance the dictatorship and earth-conquering ambitions...
...Phaon, the diver who recovers the tablets from the lost city. Like his Novelist Pursewarden in the Quartet, Durrell is a superb ironist, and the play's central theme-that man is responsible for his world as immutably as he is its victim-turns on the fact that Sappho herself has forced the destiny of Lesbos by deceitfully assuming the voice of the island's controlling oracle...