Sappho: A Garland The Poems and Fragments of Sappho (original 2002; edition 1994)

It's such a shame that what remains of this poetry is so fragmentary, because of her imagery is so amazingly beautiful. I especially liked #115:

[. . . like frightened doves:]
whose hearts turn to ice
whose wings falter . . .

And I also liked the relatively whole poem, #78, asking Aphrodite to intervene in a love affair.

I haven't read any other translation to compare these to, but these translations seem nice enough. ( )

Lombardo does it again. Unbelievably beautiful and resonant, miles and centuries away. ( )

Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian’s chief arts writer and patron of The Iris Project, has chosen to discuss Sappho’s Poems and Fragments , on FiveBooks (http://five-books.com) as one of the top five on her subject - Love and Greats, saying that:

“…Sappho was admired in antiquity for the delicacy and elegance of her verse, and this is quite right – it’s just pitch-perfect. She talks about love as being bittersweet – such a cliché but she was almost certainly the first person to coin this expression that everyone can understand. Some of the poems are wedding hymns, so they do have a heterosexual context, some are the most extraordinary personal poems of desire for women..…”.

The full interview is available here: http://thebrowser.com/books/interviews/charlotte-higgins ( )

Sappho is a great poet, and I enjoyed this book a lot. As translated by Jim Powell, Sappho is a poet who speaks directly to modern sensibilities, which many other poets of the ancient world, however great their achievement, do not.

There is nothing a translator can do about the fact that so many of her poems are missing or incomplete, except make the best job of presenting what remains - and in both his translations and the notes that accompany them, Jim Powell does just this. ( )

I love Stanley Lombardo's work, translating and commenting on Sappho. Sappho's existing body of work is pitifully small, but I felt such a resonance within me when I read these poems and fragments: Lombardo does a great job of letting us see the person within the poet, and it doesn't take a large number of poems to achieve this. What is lacking in quantity is made up by quality of language. Some poems from a man's view, some from a woman's. The emotions and feelings exposed in these poems are universal, I believe. Lombardo does his best to make Sappho approachable and real to a modern reader. I love this edition of her poetry. ( )