Sappho: A New Translation

231103 Sappho by Sappho


Sappho was a Lesbian.

No, she was.

Her husband was also a Lesbian.

They both lived on the island of Lesbos where everyone was Lesbian.

She was also one of the earliest-known poets of any gender or sexual orientation.

What we think we know about Sappho is mostly speculation or “tradition” – honored speculation that has some time behind it. Sapphic poetry was intended to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Sappho may have been the leader of a school. Some of the poems written for other women seem “steamy.” Sappho was writing her works in the Seventh Century BC, which places her centuries before Plato and Aristotle, in a Greece that was only emerging from its Dark Age following the Bronze Age Collapse.

What we have of Sapphic poetry are fragments preserved in other works, usually as an example of work use or grammar. As is the case with most poetry, the fragments are a snapshot of a moment or a feeling, they evoke more than they explain. Take this for example:

RICH AS YOU ARE
Death will finish you:

afterwards no
one will remember

or want you: you
had no share in
the Pierian roses

You will flitter
invisible among
the indistinct dead
in Hell's palace
darting fitfully

Sappho. Sappho: A New Translation (World Literature in Translation) (p. 111). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

Wow!

What is going on there?

Is Sappho taunting a rival with the prospect that her art will not be remembered or is she perhaps in a melancholy mood considering her own fate?

The collection can be read quickly. I read this with a group for the Online Great Books, and the discussion after reading it was productive.

If you are not already a poetry reader, you might give that kind of approach a shot.