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The essays in this volume review the seemingly endless permutations wrought on Sappho through centuries of readings and re-writings.
Today, thousands of years after her birth, in lands remote from her native island of Lesbos and in languages that did not exist when she wrote her poetry in Aeolic Greek, Sappho remains an important name among lovers of poetry and poets alike,. Celebrated throughout antiquity as the supreme Greek poet of love and of the personal lyric, noted especially for her limpid fusion of formal poise, lucid insight, and incandescent passion, today her poetry is also prized for its uniquely vivid participation in a living paganism. Collected in an edition of nine scrolls by scholars in the second century BC, Sappho's poetry largely disappeared when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204. All t...
Essays that aim to draw attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and to offer a sense of the lively debate and competiting critical positions within Sappho studies.
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More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are 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. This is a new translation of her surviving poetry.
What is Sappho, except a name? Although the Greek archaic lyrics attributed to Sappho of Lesbos survive only in fragments, she has been invoked for many centuries as the original woman poet, singing at the origins of a Western lyric tradition. Victorian Sappho traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late-nineteenth-century England. Yopie Prins argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho's reception; what we now call "Sappho" is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics. Prins reads the Sapphic fragments in Greek alongside various English translations and imitations, considering a ...
A vivid, contemporary translation of the greatest Greek love poet—with a wealth of materials for understanding her work—by a prize-winning poet and translator Sappho’s thrilling lyric verse has been unremittingly popular for more than 2,600 years—certainly a record for poetry of any kind—and love for her art only increases as time goes on. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete poems, her mystique endures to be discovered anew by each generation, and to inspire new efforts at bringing the spirit of her Greek words faithfully into English. In the past, translators have taken two basic approaches to Sappho: either very literally tr...
She is a woman, but also an aristocrat; a Greek, but one turned toward Asia; a poet who writes as a philosopher before philosophy; a writer who speaks of sexuality that can be identified neither with Michel Foucault's account of Greek sexuality nor with many versions of contemporary lesbian sexuality. She is named the tenth muse, yet the nine books of her poetry survive only in fragments. She disorients, troubles, undoes many certitudes in the history of poetry, the history of philosophy, the history of sexuality.
Sappho: A New Rendering is a collection of poems by Sappho, who was known as the first author of lesbian eroticism. Excerpt: "And thus at times, in Crete, the women there Circle in dance around the altar fair; In measured movement, treading as they pass, With tender feet the soft bloom of the grass."
Sappho, the earliest and most famous Greek woman poet, sang her songs around 600 BCE on the island of Lesbos. Of the little that survives from the approximately nine papyrus scrolls collected in antiquity, all is translated here: substantial poems, fragments, single words - and, notably, five stanzas of a poem that came to light in 2014. Also included are new additions to five fragments from the latest discovery, and a nearly complete poem published in 2004. The power of Sappho's poetry - her direct style, rich imagery, and passion - is apparent even in these remnants. Diane Rayor's translations of Greek poetry are graceful and poetic, modern in diction yet faithful to the originals. The full range of Sappho's voice is heard in these poems about desire, friendship, rivalry, family, and 'passion for the light of life'. In the introduction and notes, internationally respected Sappho scholar André Lardinois presents plausible reconstructions of Sappho's life and work, the importance of the recent discoveries in understanding the performance of her songs, and the story of how these fragments survived.