Recommendations for books on Sappho

I'm after the fragments of Sappho with a good commentary.

Also, any recommendations on other material would be much appreciated! Nothing too fluffy, though.

Cheers,
Stevia

English or Greek?

If you want a translation, and not just critical notes to the Greek text, then a lot is going to depend on your taste in poetry translation. Lyric poets attract a very wide range of techniques. Have a look at this old topic for a sampler using just one poem.

Greek, preferably.

My ignorance... I didn't think there was anything to comment on.

Wiki says :::

The surviving poetry

The surviving proportion of the nine-volume corpus of poetry read in antiquity is small but still constitutes a poetic corpus of major importance. There is a single complete poem, Fragment 1, Hymn to Aphrodite.26 Other major fragments include two virtually-complete poems (16 and 31 in the standard numeration) and three shorter fragments, including one whose authorship is uncertain (168b).2728

edit Recent discoveries Sappho's recently discovered poem on old age (lines 9-20). 3rd cent. B.C. papyrus, from an exhibit of the Altes Museum

The most recent addition to the corpus is a virtually-complete poem on old age. The line-ends were first published in 1922 from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, no. 1787 (fragment 1: see the third pair of images on this page), but little could be made of them, since the indications of poem-end (placed at the beginnings of the lines) were lost, and scholars could only guess where one poem ended and another began. Most of the rest of the poem has recently (2004) been published from a 3rd century BC papyrus in the Cologne University collection. The latest reconstruction, by M. L. West, appeared in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 151 (2005), 1-9, and in the Times Literary Supplement on 21 June 2005 (English translation and discussion). Another full literary translation is available.29 The Greek text has been reproduced with helpful notes for students of the language,30 together with other examples of Greek lyric poetry.

A major new literary discovery, the Milan Papyrus,31dead link recovered from a dismantled mummy casing and published in 2001, has revealed the high esteem in which the poet Posidippus of Pella, an important composer of epigrams (3rd century BC), held Sappho's 'divine songs'. An English translation of the new epigrams, with notes, is available,32 as is the original Greek text.33

Stevia - I suspect the answer to your prayers is The Sappho Companion by Margaret Reynolds. This wonderful books contains the fragments in Greek and English with reconstructions, biographical information, modern works influenced by Sappho and both modern and historical commentary - and that's just the start! It takes the reader from the historical Sappho through the ages to the present day in all her possible incarnations. Definitely not fluffy, yet still accessible. Enjoy!

Thank you everyone for helping me with this. I do suspect that The Sappho Companion is exactly what I want!

Cheers,
Stevia.