Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Sappho: A Garland : The Poems and Fragments of Sappho (original 2002; edition 1994)by Jim Powell
Work InformationPoems and Fragments by Sappho (2002)
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Despite Sappho being well... Sappho... I'm reading this mostly because of Catallus. I want to read this before I read him. He was such a big fan he called the woman he was in love with "Lesbia," ha. Anyway, her poems are actually gayer than I thought. She is, like, such a total lesbian. ( ) 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. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher Series
Little remains today of the writings of the archaic Greek poet Sappho (fl. late 7th and early 6th centuries B.C.E.), whose work is said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry--among them, poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance--that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. Stanley Lombardo's translations give us a virtuoso embodiment of Sappho's voice, whose telltale charm, authority, immediacy, directness, intensity, and sudden changes of tone are among the hallmarks of his masterly translation. Pamela Gordon introduces us to the world of Sappho, discusses questions surrounding the transmission of her manuscripts, offers advice on reading these texts, and concludes with an enlightening discussion of same-sex desire in Sappho. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)884.01Literature Greek and other Classical languages Classic HistoriographyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |