SapphoAnmeldelser

A bilingual edition (Greek on the left-hand page, English on the right) of the complete surviving poetry of Sappho, some from papyri and some from quotations by other authors of a line or even just a word. TBH, I didn't find any of it particularly memorable but it was interesting to see just how fragmentary fragments are.½

In Cytherea, amateurish apparatus for translations not hinting about methods, precision in sources and their structures but then again it's not a Loeb edition. A poetess should translate poetry and for all that I know of style the interpretation is at best dull. Reconstruction of her life is interesting, but scholarship of mid-XX century done a better job on reconstruction of Sosipatra's life with less sources available. I know, Sappho lived several centuries earlier, but was much better known than Sosipatra the Theurgist throughout the classical setting. An average compilation done half-heartedly.

Beautiful queer poetry

“and on a soft bed, delicate, you would let loose your longing”.

With his venom

Irresistible
and bittersweet

that loosener
of limbs, Love

reptile-like
strikes me down

check out paperback at Powells; pp marked in Library book include: 13, 57, 149,

Ms. Carson's Sappho is to my mind very, very brilliant. My reading experience of it was to hear the poems as sung to imaginary lyre accompaniment. What's great about that is that the fragmentary poems (i.e., all but one or two) can be "heard" as if from a distance, say, from across a courtyard or several rooms away, so it's as if because of acoustics you can only pick up a few words. Taking this approach as a reader, I found the resulting experience very natural, musical, and lifelike, and the missing words no problem (it's as if they're not missing at all, but just unable to be made out at present because of distance and/or local acoustic conditions).

I believe Carson has indeed deliberately taken this approach. You see this in her refraining from translating every word, i.e., reducing some relatively wordy fragments to one or two simple evocative nouns. Or, to take an extreme case, look at p. 59, where she's thrown all the Greek away but "for ." Carson's saying, in effect, there are no missing words; it's all there in the music. The reader just has to imagine the accompaniment.

You may forget but

let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us

This really is the year of me learning the Greeks may have been onto something with this literature thing, huh? It's completely wrecked my y-axis on publication date stats, I can tell you that. So long, 19th-century accuracy:



I'm currently in the process of writing a research paper on the wonderfully obscure, decadent, belle époque lesbian poet Renée Vivien. My thesis is simple: how Vivien viewed her sexuality in analogous themes and styles to Sappho. Her poetry is arguably the most influential aspect of Vivien's poetry, inspiring her enough to learn Greek in order to translate it into French.

For most of my queer life though, even the word Sappho grated on my ears. I associated it something a bit too ridiculous for my attention span, something mocked at more than admired. I still think modern feminists love downplaying queer women's contribution to the movement they've practically taken from them, and I for one fell for it. "Not all feminists are bra-burning lesbians!", I'm still told, reminding me that this is still the image that permeates straight women's minds. My image of lesbianism was thus doomed to theirs; a scourge of non-feminine, angry, man-hating banshees.

I think the works of Sappho dismantle that. Her work is reserved while at the same time being passionate; it is as touching as it is somber; it shows men as objects capable of as much love and desire as women too. There is nothing ridiculous about her work. Take one of my favorite poems, one of the most complete of her fragments where she speaks of an old pupil who had gone away to another teacher:

It was you, Atthis, who said

"Sappho, if you will not get
up and let us look at you
I shall never love you again!

"Get up, unleash your suppleness,
lift off your Chian nightdress
and, like a lily leaning into

"a spring, bathe in the water.
Cleis is bringing your best
purple frock and the yellow

"tunic down from the clothes chest;
you will have a cloak thrown over
you and flowers crowning your hair...

"Praxinoa, my child, will you please
roast nuts for our breakfast? One
of the gods is being good to us:

"today we are going at last
into Mitylene, our favorite
city, with Sappho, loveliest

"of its women; she will walk
among us like a mother with
all her daughters around her

"when she comes home from exile..."

But you forget everything

There is something so sensory about the descriptions of their past life together I can't get over, the gut-punch at the end making it so much more real than I thought was possible for something 2600 years old. The human condition really is invariable from time.

I see why Renée Vivien took to the work of Sappho beyond the obvious. Sappho showed the passion, the heartbreak, and the beauty in the transmutation of these feelings to so many symbols. Vivien's life was painful and tragic, the ravages of mental illness taking away much of her potential. It ruined her relationships, it ruined her body, and it ruined her mind, but still she felt fervently for every capacity of living. Sappho speaks to that I think, and I'm sure Vivien finally found her muse.

I am not a lesbian, but I may be lucky enough to love a woman one day, and Sappho's poetry reminded me that the love between women is pure. So often satirized, sensationalized, and ridiculed, those years of microaggressions actually stopped me from reading this earlier, and I'm angry. Queer men have been able to reclaim the image of eroticism for hundreds of years — from the Hellenism of the 19th century to the exaltations of Wilde and Whitman — queer women have always had much less to work with. Still so often the object of men, Sappho writes about women for women, and it shows. Every lightness, every perfumed vision remains celebrated in the psyche of women who love women to this day. Sappho lived as we do: passionate, feeling, and real. I thank her. I can only hope to love as deeply as she once did.

I read this out of curiosity after reading Mary Barnard's translation a few months ago. The rating is for Anne Carson's translation method rather than the poetry—the many brackets left me with a headache; I suppose it just is not my style. I see the allure for the more academically minded for having a side-by-side translation and many notes on her processes, but as a casual reader, I'm glad I read and loved Mary Barnard's translation first. I'm afraid to say this translation has almost left me a little sad, seeing the proof of how little we have of Sappho's writing left and the obvious flowery Barnard interpretation that I came to love and revere so much. Ah well. C'est la vie.

Having read other books on Sappho's poetry I was surprised to see what poems received notes and others being left with nothing—I felt weirdy smart having a background on a few of the poems and felt almost cheated that Carson had nothing to say about it. What else was I missing? Maybe I just like history a tad more than semantics.

For my (all intents and purposes) real review of Sappho, see here.

"Eros, that slackener of limbs, twirls me again---
bittersweet, untamable, crawling thing.

but you, Atthis, hate the thought of me,
and go flying off to Andromeda"


The poetry of Sappho is incomparably erotic and undeniably beautiful even in small fragments.

Sappho of Lesbos: Both her name and that of her native island have long designated homoerotic love between women. But she was more than that. Aristotle called her the tenth muse. As Homer was remembered as the paragon of the epic, she was of the lyric—texts meant to be sung accompanied by the lyre (she also seems to have invented one model of that instrument).
So high was the esteem she was held in that two librarians in Alexandria commissioned a collection of her works, which filled nine volumes. But, unfortunately, those have been lost like the rest of the Great Library. For centuries, the little of her preserved writing was in quotations in surviving books by others. More recently, this has been supplemented by papyrus finds (sometimes used as mummy wrapping).
It remains a fraction of what she created, perhaps ten percent. This book presents, in English translation, what we have. By my count, 479 lines. About one-third of the 150 or so pages in this volume are preface (by Carol Ann Duffy) and introduction by the translator, Aaron Poochigian. The poems and fragments themselves are printed with commentary on each facing page.
I found the editorial matter, both introduction and commentary, helpful. The introduction provides historical context and the various interpretations drawn from the little known of Sappho’s life. While the nineteenth-century suggestion that Sappho ran a boarding school was too much of its time, the reality might not have been far off. Sappho seems to have been entrusted with the care of maidens between puberty and marriage. In addition to matters of grooming and adornment, she instructed them in music and dance. Her lyrics were meant to be performed, whether solo or chorally. A good number of her works that survive are wedding hymns (epithalamia), suggesting that the group played an active role in wedding rituals as each was married off one by one. In the meantime, Sappho and her girls formed romantic attachments among themselves. The poems make clear that the boundaries between companion, teacher, role model, and lover were fluid and were no impediment to marriage (as an affair with a boy would have been).
Poochigian also explains his translation aims. He reports his disappointment that existing translations focus on the content, neglecting formal elements. On the other hand, he feels that attempts to reproduce the original meter of ancient Greek are flawed. Although Sappho didn’t, he opts to use rhyme to convey to English-speaking readers that these were song lyrics and to correspond to the emphatic line-endings Sappho often employed.
The commentary identifies geographical references and the various gods Sappho addresses (I can never keep Greek mythology straight). In the extant poems, Sappho doesn’t address male gods and only rarely refers to them. Most frequently, she appeals to Aphrodite, often addressed as Kypris (Cyprus, the island origin of the love goddess). It also identifies where a given lyric was cited by other antique authors.
And the poems themselves? I was surprised by how well they transcend the vast distance of time and language. They are the words of a woman who achieved a surprising degree of autonomy when I can’t imagine it was easy. She sings of tenderness, longing, jealousy, of the pleasure of memory. One poem I particularly enjoyed is the voice of a woman grown old, whose knees no longer permit her to join the dance. She encourages her girls to “chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright gifts and the plangent lyre, lover of hymns.” There is acceptance in her melancholy: “I groan much but to what end? Humans simply cannot be ageless like divinities.”
The poems and fragments are arranged according to theme: Goddesses, Desire and Death-Longing, Her Girls and Family, Troy, Maidens and Marriages, and The Wisdom of Sappho. I found this arrangement sensible. An appendix to this edition (2015) prints the two newest poems recovered. We can only hope that there are more to be discovered, whether in mummy wrappings or ancient trash heaps.

Like an ancient Greek ee cummings. Concupiscent and sumptuous.

Like an ancient Greek ee cummings. Concupiscent and sumptuous.

"Although I have
Only breath, words
which I command
are immortal"

Who is this poet? The lyrical nature of her poetry is evident at once, while the variety of thoughts resonate through the centuries. Can we get a glimpse of what life was like for this Greek woman from the fragments of her verse? Perhaps, we can get that glimpse and even more. I found the lines about lives lived under the sun and stars resonated with me and evoked memories of similar experiences in my own life. Hidden among the references to strange gods were words of wisdom, praise of virtue, and emotions as familiar as any experienced by those who have seen the beginning of a new century.

With only fragments of her verse she charms the reader and evokes human emotions from the realms of ancient Greece. The power and beauty of her poetry shines forth like pieces of broken glass that glisten in the light of the sun. The translation by Mary Barnard rings true as fresh metaphors line the pages. Read this poetry and be entranced by the wonder of her words.½

I found this writing to be unexceptional in the form that it exists now; it’s just so fragmentary.

‘Greek Grammar, Volume XII: But the word “roses” in Dialect X is spelled kinda funny, as in Sappho: “Roses”’.

Though I did learn that Sappho and Alcaeus were pretty classically gendered, though despite that, it sometimes being doubtful who wrote what (is that a poem of roses or a drinking song?) is kinda cute.

Found Rayor's version searching for the gayest translation of Sappho (judging by which way they turned Frag. 102 LMAO), but it also seems like the best translation I've read, the poems aren't unnaturally forced into meter, and they're all there presumably no matter how incoherent the fragment is. Also the notes are interesting and even though this seems like something aimed at classics academics (aka NOT me) the footnotes gave really context and I had a really good time reading this.
I don't know a lot about poetry, like my favorite poet is Mary Oliver just because she's super straightfoward and easy to understand, and I guess the same could be said about Sappho, I don't know how to judge poetry but I just really enjoyed reading these little fragments and wondering what the rest was like. I think this will always have me wondering what the context was

"[I] never met anyone more irritating, Eirana, than you."

This book is my first exposure to Sappho's poetry, and Barnstone's translation has a euphonious, magical quality that managed to send me into some floating rapture (or frothing seizure, depending on how you look at it) for the rest of the week. The language used is simple enough, but not dumbed down for blind consumption. The gaping holes in her verses, once inconveniences to be endured, turn into tantalising portholes for endless interpretation in Barnstone's hands. The sincerity and honesty, as well as her soaring love underpins most of her poetry, which really endeared me to her work. I would strongly advise new readers to not focus too much on her sexuality and simply appreciate her poetry as it is.

How spellbinding and redolent Sappho's fragments are. In their spaces, incompleteness, and briefness lie the beauty of a thousand interpretations and perceptions. Indeed, it's quite a waste to think that most of her works are lost forever and that we must rely on our imagination in envisioning this stunning arrangement of words ("sweetworded desires", "goldsandaled Dawn", "piercing breezes") sung accompanied by the gentleness of the lyre — wooing, proclaiming, praising. Other than Sappho's indubitable genius as a poet, Anne Carson's translation is not to be missed. Each "]" that designates parts of a papyrus indecipherable / destroyed hints of a much grandeur whole. All is felt and guessed. Moreover, Carson's section for Notes provides fascinating insight on some of her literary decisions regarding the translation, some points theorise for what / for whom perhaps a certain fragment is for. I also marvelled on some of the influences included.

"I don't know what to do
two states of mind in me"
— FRAGMENT 51

"you came and I was crazy for you
and you cooled my mind that burned with longing"
— FRAGMENT 48

Throughout the course of reading this, I tend to forget what's missing due to their sheer brilliance alone ("mingled with all kinds of colors", "both you and my servant Eros", "may you sleep on the breast of your delicate friend"). I'd like to think the lost / destroyed papyri have been sieved; a matrimony with the earth. Oh how much more in their wholeness? Currently, this book is resting on my bed and I sleep beside it. All these nights I leaf through it, more so when sleep would not come, comforting myself with pictures they form in my head; an intimate commune I built for Sappho and me. What an experience.½

While the title of this collection highlights the erotic attitude of the poems of Sappho, there is a wonderful fragment of a poem entitled "Troy" that presents a mythic narrative. In doing so she veers away from the emphasis of the Homeric epic and focuses on a conventionally 'feminine' theme, a wedding scene. She elevates the wedding to epic magnitude, all the while featuring excellence rather than the morality of good and evil.

Other poems and fragments present themes of goddesses, desire, girls and their family, and marriage. The result in an excellent translation is a delightful selection. Here is a typical quatrain:

Untainted Graces
With wrists like roses,
Please come close,
You daughters of Zeus.

Sappho lived in a time of transition for Greece, after the Homeric era but before the more famous Golden Age of Athens. I, like others, find her language enchanting, and the gathering of poems and fragments by subject lends an order to this collection. Her passion shines through both the millennia and the translation to charm the reader while leaving a bit of sadness that we do not have more of her oeuvre.½

La poetisa griega Safo nació en la isla de Lesbos, seguramente en Mitilene, a finales del siglo VII antes de Cristo. Los fragmentos conservados de su obra constituyen una muestra de la primera poesía lírica que se hizo en Europa. Compuesta para el canto y difundida en un contexto todavía enigmático, la poesía de la «décima Musa» se convirtió ya desde Grecia en una referencia de autoridad indiscutible para la literatura creada por mujeres. Su discurso sobre eros—sutil y perturbador—, la estilizada inmediatez de su lenguaje y su inventiva métrica y formal han fascinado a lectores y escritores de todos los tiempos, desde Platón y Catulo hasta Virginia Woolf y Marguerite Yourcenar. Esta nueva traducción, realizada por la también poeta Aurora Luque—premio de poesía Loewe 2019—, consigue una vez más rejuvenecer el texto, huyendo de la erudición anquilosada y recuperando la frescura de los versos sáficos con las «armas legítimas de la poesía viva». La presente edición, puesta al día en 2020, añade la traducción de los nuevos poemas sáficos rescatados en papiros en 2004 y 2014, así como numerosos testimonios sobre la autora.

Ik verlang en sta in brand. Van Sapfo tot Sulpicia. Vertaald en toegelicht door Mieke de Vos.

De Vos publiceerde hiervoor al vertalingen van Sapfo en Propertius, en ze is gepromoveerd op gender en de receptie van Griekse dichteressen in de klassieke oudheid, wat van haar de uitgelezen persoon maakt om dit boek te publiceren.

Ik verlang en sta in brand klinkt en ziet er uit als een boek voor op je nachtkastje (een heel mooi boek trouwens) maar het is veel meer dan dat. Door de uitgebreide kennis van de Vos, die ze in haar toelichtingen deelt, is dit meer een wetenschappelijk werk. Een boeiende kennismaking met het begin van onze literatuurgeschiedenis, een interesse-aanwakkerende-inleiding tot een fascinerende wereld. Achteraan dit boek vind je trouwens een leeslijst, als je je verder wil verdiepen in de vrouwen uit de antieke dichtkunst.

Sapfo mag dan wel de bekendste zijn, voor mij sprong Anyte er tussenuit. Haar taal en de verhalen mogen dan wel antiek zijn, de gevoelens die ze beschrijft zijn nog helemaal herkenbaar. Dat geldt in feite voor alle gedichten in dit boek. Goede poëzie is van nu en toen en voor de eeuwigheid.

PO-2

PO-5

a translation neither poetic nor literal, due to what seem like rather lazy word choices which slipped in while the translator was imitating the meter. i look at Ode To Aphrodite and see only one line which i could not improve. —let's just say that constant enjambment is counterproductive in this effort, because the one guaranteed effect of enjambment is the muting of the meter. there's no problem if the verse is put to song, but we've only got the verse, so tighten up that rhythm.