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“I Beg You, Gongyla”Spyros D. OrfanosPublished online: 12 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Spyros D. Orfanos (2011) “I Beg You, Gongyla”, PsychoanalyticPerspectives, 8:2, 283-283, DOI: 10.1080/1551806X.2011.10486319

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1551806X.2011.10486319

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‘‘I Beg You, Gongyla” 283

“I BEG YOU, GONGYLA”

By Sappho (600 B.C.E.)

Translated from the Greek by Spyros D. Orfanos, PhD, ABPP

Before the era of luminous rationalism, the Classical Greeks idealized beauty and E m . Sappho, the poet from the Aegean island of Lesbos, best exemplified this sensibility with a pure lyricism, full of Dionysian impulses and dynamism. For 25 centuries her love poems have survived, albeit in fragments, because they affirm the senses of beauty.

Come back again, I beg you, Gongyla. Reveal yourself in your garment

white as milk; o what desire forever around you, my lovely girl.

This charming garment stirs her who beholds you, for she who expresses

this reproach to you is the goddess herself Cyprus-born, whom now I invoke.

N W I’ostdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis 240 Greene St., Suite 303 New York, NY 10003 spyrosdorfanos@gmail.com

Spyros D. Orfanos, PhD, ABPP, is clinic director at the New York University Postdoctoral Pro- gram in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is also president of the International Association of Kelational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He studies art, literature, and philosophy as aspects of some kind ofwhole human endeavor, often called civilization and culture, but not as social scientists use the terms. He claims to be able to hear Sappho singing, “Eros, Eros, Eros. ”

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