Cashman
Kerr Prince Pierre Louÿs, Les Chansons
de Bilitis, and the Queered Lyric Voice
Published in 1894, Les Chansons de Bilitis
presents itself as the French translation by Pierre
Louÿs (pen name of Pierre-Félix Louis) of
texts engraved on the walls of a tomb on Cyprus. Dating
from the sixth century BCE, these poems record the
amorous life of a female contemporary of Sappho, who,
like Sappho (only more explicitly) loved women.
The
«Vie de Bilitis» which opens Louÿs'
translation quotes from the site report of the
German
archaeologist G. Heim; the young Louÿs was then
inspired to present the first French translation of these
lyric poems in "rhythmical prose." In both the first, and
expanded second editions, of Les Chansons,
the tables of contents list titles of poems which are not
translated; with titles such as "The Joy" and "The Bed,"
the audience is left to assume some poems, although
written 2,500 years previous, were too explicit for even
fin-de-siècle French readers. Despite this seeming
reticence, Louÿs found a large and receptive
audience for his book.
For all the trappings of verisimilitude, these poems are
fraudulent translations. Under the guise of translating
the love lyrics of an ancient Greek courtesan, Louÿs
wrote original poems in prose. This translation is a
deliberate obfuscation: Louÿs' Bilitis takes its
starting point from the notice of one Damophyla, an
imitator of Sappho, in Philostratos' Life of
Apollonius of Tyana.
The spirit of ancient Greece suffuses these poems, yet
this is a resurrection of an imagined ancient Greece;
perhaps most daringly, one poem recounts Bilitis waking
next to Sappho (or, "Psappha," as her name appears in
Bilitis). Scholars still debate Louÿs' intentions; suffice it to
say that some readers were deceived by these
"translations" and many took Bilitis for a real personage
(including the editors of some dictionaries of Classical
antiquities).
History
and lyric merge; so do sex and lies. From the pen of a
French dandy and decadent, nominally heterosexual, came
the poster-girl for early twentieth century lesbianism:
when Renée Vivien and Natalie Barney started
hosting their (largely lesbian) literary salon, they
styled themselves followers of Bilitis. (Indeed,
Louÿs was a major influence on the literary style of
Vivien.) The first edition was dedicated to André
Gide; following a rupture between these two men, the
dedication of the second edition of Les Chansons de
Bilitis reads: "This little book of antique love
is respectfully dedicated to the young women of a future
society." From Vivien and Barney, the image of this
"future society" passed (thirty years after the author's
death) to the American lesbian movement, The Daughters of
Bilitis (founded in San Francisco in 1955). From the
nexus of Classical archaeology (imagined) and Classical
philology (real), decadence, literary deceit, the rise of
homosexuality (as a category), and some degree of
prurient sexual interest on the part of Louÿs into
the love-lives of lesbians, was born an enduring figure
of twentieth-century lesbian hopes and dreams. Bilitis
began as an apparition, one man's shocking (certainly to
Wilamowitz) and subversive expression of lesbian desire
in the ancient Mediterranean; a miasma of Orientalism
veils this fictional embodiment of female homosexual
desire. Yet from this queer beginning comes a queer icon;
Bilitis lives on, having transcended Louÿs' literary
deception to acquire new layers of meaning from
successive generations of lesbians in search of a
foremother.
This paper proposes to present Les Chansons de
Bilitis, examine poems typical of the collection,
and trace the confluence of events which speak through
the figure of Bilitis. Within this nexus of influences we
see the imbrication of Classical Studies and queer
identity; fortunately for us, this is an instance of vice
speaking (in French, if not in ancient Greek).