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    Poems of Sappho
    Poems of Sappho
    Poems of Sappho
    Ebook92 pages54 minutes

    Poems of Sappho

    By Sappho and John Maxwell Edmonds

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    About this ebook

    Plato hailed her as "the Tenth Muse," and 2,500 years later her voice remains dazzling as well as direct and honest. Sappho, a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, wrote verse that sings to both sexes of desire, rapture, and sorrow. Praised for their simplicity and sincerity, her poems nevertheless evoke powerful and memorable images as well as a sense of unreserved eroticism. Her focus on emotion and individualism sets her work apart from that of her contemporaries, lending it an intimacy that foreshadows modern poetry.
    Details about Sappho's life are largely unknown; she is thought to have lived sometime between 612–570 B.C.E., and her poetry was read and admired throughout the ancient world. Today her poems survive in fragmentary form, and she is best known as a symbol of female homosexuality, having inspired the terms "sapphic" and "lesbian." This concise collection of her surviving works features an informative Introduction by translator J. M. Edmonds.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateJan 10, 2018
    ISBN9780486828213
    Poems of Sappho
    Author

    Sappho

    Mary Barnard (1909–2001) was a prominent American poet, translator, and biographer with many books in her repertoire. She studied Greek at Reed College and began to translate at Ezra Pound's suggestion in the 1930s. Her Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir was published by the University of California Press in 1984. Two years later she received the Western States Book Award for her book-length poem, Time and the White Tigress. She also published prose fiction and a volume of essays on mythology as well as the original lyrics gathered in Collected Poems.  

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    • 5/5
      The best translation of Sappho I have ever read. Ms. Barnard has maticulously translated the fragments without embellishments or popular nuances which some other translations seem compelled to do.
    • 4/5
      When I first flipped through this short book of Ancient Greek poetry, I didn't think I would like it because all of the poems were so short, and most that I glanced over seemed vague and pointless.However, I decided to read the entire 114 page book aloud to myself while bored one day... And found myself getting caught up in the beautiful, delicate, femininely classical style of Sappho's writing.I found that many of the short, fragmented poems were related to other poems that had come previously or afterward.The best word I can think of to describe this poetry is - "gorgeous." The pure beauty of Sappho's words is lovely.Also, I would strongly advise reading the Footnotes (page 95) written by the translator, Mary Barnard. They are greatly helpful, because Sappho often mentions names and unfamiliar places in her poetry. It is helpful to know, for example, that Cleis was the name of her mother, and that most of the other girls she speaks of were her students, whom she instructed religious dance to.Sappho is a genius poet of Ancient Greece. Beautiful poetry.
    • 4/5
      Beautiful in its simplicity. It didn't really inspire much reflection in me, but it was still soothing and pleasant.
    • 4/5
      Sappho is the great lyric poet of antiquity. Plato called her the "tenth muse." Her poems were preserved until nearly A.D 1000, at least according to A Book of Woman Poets, "when a wrathful church destroyed whatever it could find. In 1073 her writings were publicly burned in Rome and Constantinople by order of Pope Gregory VIII." Almost all of Sappho's poems survive only in fragments found in pot shards, scraps of papyrus used to wrap mummies and quotations by grammarians and others, ruins of once magnificent structures. Sadly, unless we get a major find on the order of the Dead Sea Scrolls, these 100 fragments are all we have. Not knowing Greek, I can't really judge Mary Barnard's translation, but despite the fragmentary nature of what survived Sappho comes through as a personalities and amazing poet: : vernal, refined--but at times frank in speaking of desire. The Footnotes starting on page 95 are illuminating.

    Book preview

    Poems of Sappho - Sappho

    POEMS OF SAPPHO

    Sappho

    Translated and with an Introduction by

    John Maxwell Edmonds

    DOVER PUBLICATION, INC.

    MINEOLA, NEW YORK

    DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

    GENERAL EDITOR: SUSAN L. RATTINER EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JANET BAINE KOPITO

    Bibliographical Note

    This Dover edition, first published in 2018, is a republication of the work originally published as Sappho Revocata by Peter Davies, London, in 1928. The original Greek portion of the text has been omitted. The Introduction is reprinted from Sappho: in the Added Light of the New Fragments by J. M. Edmonds, Deighton Bell and Co., Cambridge, 1912.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Sappho, author. | Edmonds, John Maxwell, translator.

    Title: Poems of Sappho / translated and with an introduction by John Maxwell Edmonds.

    Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2018.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2017042684 | ISBN 9780486817279 | ISBN 048681727X Classification: LCC PA4408.E8 E34 2018 | DDC 884/.01—dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042684

    Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

    81727X01   2018

    www.doverpublications.com

    Contents

    Introduction

    Apology

    Life of Sappho

    The Poems

    Introduction

    On a certain page of the grammarian Herodian, who wrote about 150 A.D., there are three short lines of poetry which I will quote in their context. Herodian says: "There is no parallel, as regards quantity, to the word . For if a is followed by double λ in the same word, it is regularly short, except in the case of a for η in a dialect. For instance, , , and many other such words which are unmistakeable. The word therefore must be noted as unique in respect of quantity. For has the a short. I made the above exception in the case of dialects because of the following:³⁵*

    ‘You foolish girl, you may pride yourself on a ring, for aught I care,’ and this:—¹¹⁰

    ‘You foolish girl, seek not to bend a stubborn heart,’ and this:—⁵⁵

    ‘Come close, my dainty one, for whom I’d been so long distraught,’

    standing for ."

    He does not say, you see, who the author is. The poems, or at any rate the first lines of them, were obviously as familiar to his public as, let us say, ‘Not a drum was heard’ to the readers of an English grammar. The modern admirer of Sappho, and she has many, could not fail to recognise her even in these three short and disconnected lines. And I think even those who have never read a line of her before will agree that here amid prosaic and pedantic surroundings is a personality worth studying. With a few lucky exceptions this passage is typical of the way in which Sappho’s works have come down to us. They are quoted not for their beauty but for their antiquarian interest. And in spite of that—but you must judge for yourselves.

    Stobaeus has preserved a little anecdote of Solon the lawgiver. One day after dinner, he says, his nephew sang him a song of Sappho’s. Solon liked the song so much that he requested the boy to teach it him, and when one of the guests asked, in surprise, ‘ What for ?’ he replied I want to learn it and die.’ In Solon’s time, then, Sappho’s songs were evidently just coming in at Athens,—they were familiar to the young people but not to their elders,— and this story is an interesting piece of testimony to the effect Sappho’s poetry produced upon her contemporaries. Solon died about the year 559 at the age of eighty, and the one date that we know for certain in Sappho’s life is the year of her banishment from Mitylene, 596. The poet Alcaeus, who fled under the same edict of the democratic tyrant Pittacus, returned under an amnesty fifteen years afterwards, that is to say, in 581, and it is thought probable that Sappho, who had taken refuge in Sicily, returned about the same time. A scholion to one of the new fragments* of Alcaeus tells us that the aristocrats were banished on more than one occasion by the tyrants of Mitylene, the first time by Myrsilus. Now we know that Sappho’s brother Charaxus was engaged in the wine-trade between Mitylene and Naucratis in Egypt, and this was not possible before Egypt was thrown open to Greek

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