![]() “ Greener than grass I am and dead-or almost I seem to me,” Sappho says (in Anne Carson’s translation). The narrative voice, first person and female, is concerned with what she calls “today,” a word “only suicides ought to be allowed to use, it has no meaning for other people.” “Today” is time as emergency, a present overtaken by what, elsewhere, she calls a “virus,” by which I suspect she means what someone else might call love (or being in love), if, by saying love, they meant a condition that suddenly renders a person incomplete. What I encountered was a portrait, in language, of female consciousness, truer than anything written since Sappho’s Fragment 31. ![]() Whether consciously or not, I put a claim on her, as someone to study, on account of her status as an honorary man. The way he announced the existence of Ingeborg Bachmann suggested that he believed, consciously or not, that she belonged to the world of men perhaps she even derived from it. This was an office setting, and he was in a position above me. The way he held his expensive raincoat over one arm. He said it in the way his shoes were shined. The man who was speaking to me didn’t have to say it. In “important” and “Austrian” and “work,” I computed that its author, a woman, was in fact an honorary man. “Yes, a very important work by a major Austrian writer.” ![]() ![]() It sounded so important and complete: Ma-li-na, stress on the final syllable. I remember the first time I heard the word “ Malina.” Where I was standing, what room I was in, the man who said the word. ![]()
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