speaker-0: A note to listeners This episode contains depiction of a suicide attempt. Please listen with care. A heart-shaped flower that falls into the palm of your hand, small enough to close your fist around, and still it finds you, that scent, long after you've let go.
speaker-1: Welcome back to the language of flowers. This is an episode about a flower that some might even call charming, intoxicatingly sweet and deeply veined, and although it grows low to the ground and flourishes where light is low, it personifies a love that spreads fastly and brightly.
speaker-0: A love that continues to find a home in poems, in pages, in memory, in spite of what may aim to bury it. Today, we're talking about violets.
speaker-1: six hundred years before the Common Era, on the island of Lesbos, a poet is writing about love and desire with unusual precision. Her name is Sappho.
speaker-0: What have her work now isn't a complete book. It's scraps, lines preserved by accident and admiration, in quotes copied by later writers, and pieces rescued from the edges of other texts.
speaker-1: But even in fragments, Sappho's voice is unmistakable. She writes about women, perfume on skin, soft fabrics, warmth, and always violets. Violets woven into hair, worn as crowns, and wound into garlands.
speaker-0: These aren't mere decorative details, they're tactile. To weave violets into someone's hair, you have to be close enough to feel their breath. Your fingers and their hair, the smell of the flower, and the smell of the person become indistinguishable. Close enough that the body starts making requests.
speaker-1: And sometimes Sappho names the beloved directly. To one of her most famous surviving poems, she writes Some say an army of horsemen is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth. I say it is whatever one loves. And then she tells us who she loves. An actoria, not as an abstraction, but as a body moving through light, as someone whose walk, whose particular brightness, She would rather see than any army.
speaker-0: In another excerpt, the one scholars call Fragment 31, Sappho describes what happens to her body when she watches a woman she desires speaking with someone else. Her tongue breaks, fire moves under her skin, her eyes see nothing. She is close to dying, she says, from looking. To want a woman so much, you come apart at the sight of her. This is not metaphor softened for public consumption. This is a woman writing about desire for another woman with complete honesty.
speaker-1: For centuries, translators tried to make that desire disappear. They changed the gender of the beloved, decided Sappho must have had a slip of the tongue.
speaker-0: But this is a voice who refused to be mistranslated. Sappho never stops saying, This is who I love and this is what it does to me.
speaker-1: And more than two thousand years later, someone finally reaches back and reads Sappho honestly. Her name is Renee Vivien.
speaker-0: So now we're in Paris in the early twentieth century, in literary salons and radical art circles. Rene Vivienne is openly lesbian, fiercely intellectual, and obsessed with Sappho. Not as myth, but as ancestor.
speaker-1: Vivienne learns ancient Greek so she can read Sappho properly. She translates her. She writes new poems addressed to women, directly, erotically, unapologetically. She publishes them under her own name. So Vivienne doesn't just study Sappho, she evokes her through time and space.
speaker-0: And violets bloom all through Vivienne's work. Essential, sapphic, deliberate symbols. By this point, violets already carry centuries of association with love between women. Vivienne knows that. She uses it. Not as secret code, but as declaration. She even serves candied violets at her salon table, a flower you can eat and carry inside you. To taste what you love. And let it dissolve on the tongue.
speaker-1: And yet critics respond to Vivian with hostility, voyeurism, and attempts to silence her. For years, her work is unsellable in England and the United States. It won't be translated into English for another seventy years.
speaker-0: And in nineteen ⁓ eight, Vivienne attempts suicide by drinking an excess of laudenum. She lies down, stretched out on her divan, with bouquet of violets held over her heart.
speaker-1: Even in the face of death, Vivienne is carrying another poet's love across millennia and refusing to let it drop.
speaker-0: Vivienne survives, but dies only a year later from what was likely pneumonia at the young age of thirty two. Her life was brief and difficult, illness, addiction, heartbreak, and a world that told her what she loved was wrong.
speaker-1: But just as violets spread easily once the seed lands, Vivienne had already bound Sappho to modern queer literature, where she continued to take root.
speaker-0: By the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, violets move beyond the work of any single poet. They become a shared language among lesbians, worn at the collar, gifted in bouquets, and creased into letters.
speaker-1: In 1926, a play called The Captive made that language visible to people who wanted to destroy it. A female character sends violets to another woman she loves. But the play was shut down by the New York City District Attorney. Violet sales at American florists plummeted. The association had been made, and people wanted it buried.
speaker-0: But women wore violets to the theater anyway, in Paris, in New York, sitting beside each other in the dark, shoulders almost touching, wearing everything they couldn't say out loud.
speaker-1: Violets are meant to be picked, worn, passed generously between people. They move by touch.
speaker-0: Poems break, but the words remain. The lives end, but not the lineage. The flower changes hands and keeps blooming.
speaker-1: That's it for today's episode of The Language of Flowers. But before you go, think about who has loved before you and made it possible for you to love the way you did.
speaker-0: Because love doesn't wait for permission. It just needs somewhere to land. See you next time. Hi, we really hope you liked this episode of The Language of Flowers. Our podcast is executive produced, written, and hosted by me, Nina Ozier. Our co-host and cover artist is Jake Kaplan. Elliot Terzian is our audio producer and sound mixer, and our theme music is by Paul Olifont. Thanks so much for listening.
speaker-1: Welcome back to the language of flowers. This is an episode about a flower that some might even call charming, intoxicatingly sweet and deeply veined, and although it grows low to the ground and flourishes where light is low, it personifies a love that spreads fastly and brightly.
speaker-0: A love that continues to find a home in poems, in pages, in memory, in spite of what may aim to bury it. Today, we're talking about violets.
speaker-1: six hundred years before the Common Era, on the island of Lesbos, a poet is writing about love and desire with unusual precision. Her name is Sappho.
speaker-0: What have her work now isn't a complete book. It's scraps, lines preserved by accident and admiration, in quotes copied by later writers, and pieces rescued from the edges of other texts.
speaker-1: But even in fragments, Sappho's voice is unmistakable. She writes about women, perfume on skin, soft fabrics, warmth, and always violets. Violets woven into hair, worn as crowns, and wound into garlands.
speaker-0: These aren't mere decorative details, they're tactile. To weave violets into someone's hair, you have to be close enough to feel their breath. Your fingers and their hair, the smell of the flower, and the smell of the person become indistinguishable. Close enough that the body starts making requests.
speaker-1: And sometimes Sappho names the beloved directly. To one of her most famous surviving poems, she writes Some say an army of horsemen is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth. I say it is whatever one loves. And then she tells us who she loves. An actoria, not as an abstraction, but as a body moving through light, as someone whose walk, whose particular brightness, She would rather see than any army.
speaker-0: In another excerpt, the one scholars call Fragment 31, Sappho describes what happens to her body when she watches a woman she desires speaking with someone else. Her tongue breaks, fire moves under her skin, her eyes see nothing. She is close to dying, she says, from looking. To want a woman so much, you come apart at the sight of her. This is not metaphor softened for public consumption. This is a woman writing about desire for another woman with complete honesty.
speaker-1: For centuries, translators tried to make that desire disappear. They changed the gender of the beloved, decided Sappho must have had a slip of the tongue.
speaker-0: But this is a voice who refused to be mistranslated. Sappho never stops saying, This is who I love and this is what it does to me.
speaker-1: And more than two thousand years later, someone finally reaches back and reads Sappho honestly. Her name is Renee Vivien.
speaker-0: So now we're in Paris in the early twentieth century, in literary salons and radical art circles. Rene Vivienne is openly lesbian, fiercely intellectual, and obsessed with Sappho. Not as myth, but as ancestor.
speaker-1: Vivienne learns ancient Greek so she can read Sappho properly. She translates her. She writes new poems addressed to women, directly, erotically, unapologetically. She publishes them under her own name. So Vivienne doesn't just study Sappho, she evokes her through time and space.
speaker-0: And violets bloom all through Vivienne's work. Essential, sapphic, deliberate symbols. By this point, violets already carry centuries of association with love between women. Vivienne knows that. She uses it. Not as secret code, but as declaration. She even serves candied violets at her salon table, a flower you can eat and carry inside you. To taste what you love. And let it dissolve on the tongue.
speaker-1: And yet critics respond to Vivian with hostility, voyeurism, and attempts to silence her. For years, her work is unsellable in England and the United States. It won't be translated into English for another seventy years.
speaker-0: And in nineteen ⁓ eight, Vivienne attempts suicide by drinking an excess of laudenum. She lies down, stretched out on her divan, with bouquet of violets held over her heart.
speaker-1: Even in the face of death, Vivienne is carrying another poet's love across millennia and refusing to let it drop.
speaker-0: Vivienne survives, but dies only a year later from what was likely pneumonia at the young age of thirty two. Her life was brief and difficult, illness, addiction, heartbreak, and a world that told her what she loved was wrong.
speaker-1: But just as violets spread easily once the seed lands, Vivienne had already bound Sappho to modern queer literature, where she continued to take root.
speaker-0: By the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, violets move beyond the work of any single poet. They become a shared language among lesbians, worn at the collar, gifted in bouquets, and creased into letters.
speaker-1: In 1926, a play called The Captive made that language visible to people who wanted to destroy it. A female character sends violets to another woman she loves. But the play was shut down by the New York City District Attorney. Violet sales at American florists plummeted. The association had been made, and people wanted it buried.
speaker-0: But women wore violets to the theater anyway, in Paris, in New York, sitting beside each other in the dark, shoulders almost touching, wearing everything they couldn't say out loud.
speaker-1: Violets are meant to be picked, worn, passed generously between people. They move by touch.
speaker-0: Poems break, but the words remain. The lives end, but not the lineage. The flower changes hands and keeps blooming.
speaker-1: That's it for today's episode of The Language of Flowers. But before you go, think about who has loved before you and made it possible for you to love the way you did.
speaker-0: Because love doesn't wait for permission. It just needs somewhere to land. See you next time. Hi, we really hope you liked this episode of The Language of Flowers. Our podcast is executive produced, written, and hosted by me, Nina Ozier. Our co-host and cover artist is Jake Kaplan. Elliot Terzian is our audio producer and sound mixer, and our theme music is by Paul Olifont. Thanks so much for listening.
