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.
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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. ( )

Like an ancient Greek ee cummings. Concupiscent and sumptuous. ( )