sappho if not winter fragments of sappho vintage tr carson

In the extant poems, Sappho doesn’t address male gods and only rarely refers to them. The commentary identifies geographical references and the various gods Sappho addresses (I can never keep Greek mythology straight). 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. On the other hand, he feels that attempts to reproduce the original meter of ancient Greek are flawed. He reports his disappointment that existing translations focus on the content, neglecting formal elements. Poochigian also explains his translation aims. 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).

In the meantime, Sappho and her girls formed romantic attachments among themselves.

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. Her lyrics were meant to be performed, whether solo or chorally. In addition to matters of grooming and adornment, she instructed them in music and dance. Sappho seems to have been entrusted with the care of maidens between puberty and marriage. 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. The introduction provides historical context and the various interpretations drawn from the little known of Sappho’s life. I found the editorial matter, both introduction and commentary, helpful. The poems and fragments themselves are printed with commentary on each facing page. 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. This book presents, in English translation, what we have. It remains a fraction of what she created, perhaps ten percent. More recently, this has been supplemented by papyrus finds (sometimes used as mummy wrapping). For centuries, the little of her preserved writing was in quotations in surviving books by others.

But, unfortunately, those have been lost like the rest of the Great Library. So high was the esteem she was held in that two librarians in Alexandria commissioned a collection of her works, which filled nine volumes. 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). Sappho of Lesbos: Both her name and that of her native island have long designated homoerotic love between women.

Sappho if not winter fragments of sappho vintage tr carson