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Greek Lyric, Volume I: Sappho. Alcaeus
This volume contains the poetic fragments of the two illustrious singers of early sixth-century Lesbos: Sappho, the most famous woman poet of antiquity, whose main theme was love; and Alcaeus, poet of wine, war, and politics, and composer of short hymns to the gods. Also included are the principal testimonia, the ancients' reports on the lives and work of the two poets.
The five volumes in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Greek Lyric contain the surviving fragments of solo and choral song. This poetry was not preserved in medieval manuscripts, and few complete poems remain. Later writers quoted from the poets, but only so much as suited their needs; these quotations are supplemented by papyrus texts found in Egypt, most of them badly damaged. The high quality of what remains makes us realise the enormity of our loss.
Volume I presents Sappho and Alcaeus. Volume II contains the work of Anacreon, composer of solo song; the Anacreontea; and the earliest writers of choral poetry, notably the seventh-century Spartans Alcman and Terpander. Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and other sixth-century poets are in Volume III. Bacchylides and other fifth-century poets are in Volume IV along with Corinna (although some argue that she belongs to the third century). Volume V contains the new school of poets active from the mid-fifth to the mid-fourth century and also collects folk songs, drinking songs, hymns, and other anonymous pieces.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 551
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About the author
Sappho
337 books1,937 followersWork of Greek lyric poet Sappho, noted for its passionate and erotic celebration of the beauty of young women and men, after flourit circa 600 BC and survives only in fragments.
Ancient history poetry texts associate Sappho (Σαπφώ or Ψάπφω) sometimes with the city of Mytilene or suppose her birth in Eresos, another city, sometime between 630 BC and 612 BC. She died around 570 BC. People throughout antiquity well knew and greatly admired the bulk, now lost, but her immense reputation endured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho
Ancient history poetry texts associate Sappho (Σαπφώ or Ψάπφω) sometimes with the city of Mytilene or suppose her birth in Eresos, another city, sometime between 630 BC and 612 BC. She died around 570 BC. People throughout antiquity well knew and greatly admired the bulk, now lost, but her immense reputation endured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho
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February 25, 2017
•Greek Lyric: Sappho · Alcaeus, tr. David A Campbell, Loeb 1990
•If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, tr. Anne Carson, Virago 2002
•Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments, tr. Aaron Poochigian, Penguin 2015
SAPPHICS FOR SAPPHO
Each ellipsis teases, inviting dreams – dreams
Formed from torn papyruses' single words. Bare,
Lonely scrawls of sigmas and psis that sing, still,
Sticky with meaning.
Fragments all. What's left is the one percent, rich,
Rare. When Alexandria burned, the whole world
Choked to breathe the smoke of the ninety-nine. Now,
Desperate to get you
Back, we trawl millennia-old unearthed dumps,
Hunting out your clotted Aeolic strung lines.
Lone hendecasyllables' sounds that awed Greeks
After you quoted.
Questing, reading, marvelling – so we search on,
Poets seeking answers to questions all lost
Lovers ask. Your answers still reach us, drenched, fresh
From the Aegean.
A LIFE IN FRAGMENTS
Towards the end of the second century AD, in the last flickering light of classical Greece, a philosopher called Maximus, in a city on the Levantine coast, wrote a grammatical textbook about figures of speech. Casting around in old books for examples of how poets have described love, he writes: ‘Diotima says that Love flourishes when he has abundance but dies when he is in need: Sappho combined these ideas and called Love bitter-sweet and “ἀλγεσίδωρον”.’
So we have this one word that Sappho wrote, some eight centuries before Maximus was born. This is what we mean when we talk about her poetry existing in ‘fragments’. The Canadian poet Anne Carson translates this example as:
Very often these remnants are quoted with no regard to any poetic quality, but rather in illustration of some grammatical point. Apollonius Dyscolus, for instance, writing again some time in the 100s AD, included a throwaway remark on variant dialects during an essay on pronouns. ‘The Aeolians,’ he said, ‘spell ὅς [‘his, hers, its’] with digamma in all cases and genders, as in Sappho's τὸν ϝὸν παῖδα κάλει.’ Again Carson's translation gives us just the phrase in question:
Carson's translation of Sappho's oeuvre is well subtitled ‘Fragments of Sappho’, since most of what's left is of this nature. It's certainly nice to have everything collected in this way in English, though it must be admitted that her book sometimes seems more an exercise in completionism than in poetic expression. That said, as other reviewers have pointed out, reading pages and pages of these deracinated terms (‘holder…crossable…I might go…downrushing’) can succeed in generating a certain hypnotic, Zen-like appeal.
Nevertheless, such things lose a lot by being read in isolation; the as it were archaeological pleasure of digging them out of their original context, in works of grammar or rhetoric, is completely absent. For that, the Loeb edition translated by David A. Campbell is far preferable, for all that he has no pretensions to being a poet, just because you get Sappho delivered in that context of other writers. The fonts used for the Greek are also much more readable in the Loeb. (The Carson edition does include the original Greek, and points for that – though there are some strange editorial…choices? mistakes? – such as printing ς for σ in all positions.)
MUSIC AND LYRICS
To the Ancient Greeks, Homer was simply ‘The Poet’ – and ‘The Poetess’ was Sappho. She was held in extraordinarily high esteem, which makes it the more frustrating that so much of her has been lost: ninety-nine percent, according to some experts. Only one or two poems remain that can be said to be more or less complete.
Her poetry is mainly ‘lyric’, that is, designed to be sung while strumming along on the lyre. Sappho was, in modern terms, a singer-songwriter; she was known to be an extremely talented musician, designing a new kind of lyre and perhaps even inventing the plectrum. When we read her poetry now, we have to remember that we're looking at something like a shredded collection of Bob Dylan or Georges Brassens lyrics, with no idea of how their meaning would have interacted with the music.
But however important the lost melodies, we do know that she was revered for the beauty of her phrasing. This is something translators struggle with. Fragment 146, a proverb about not wanting to take the bad with the good, is rendered literally by Campbell as ‘I want neither the honey nor the bee’ and by Carson, ‘Neither for me honey nor the honey bee’ – which is better, but consider the alliterative dazzle of the original:
Reading the Greek, even if you don't understand what any of the words mean, will often get you halfway there with Sappho. Say it out loud and you'll get a tingle, as it starts to dawn on you what all the fuss might have been about.
But the rest of the job has to be done by translators. The Loeb edition will not help you here: its prose translations are only a crib to help you study the original. Carson's approach is slightly conflicted. She quotes approvingly a well-known statement from Walter Benjamin to the effect that a translation should ‘find that intended effect…which produces in it the echo of the original’, i.e. that one should translate ideas and feelings rather than words. But she also claims to be trying to use ‘where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did’, which is the sort of thing that makes me instantly suspicious.
Here's her version of Fragment 2, which is one of the more complete poems we have, scratched on to a broken piece of pottery which has miraculously survived from the second century AD. The first stanza (an invocation to Aphrodite) is probably missing, but the next two run like this:
This is not bad. I think the word order is unnecessarily foreign at times, but it does sound good and Carson even includes a few of Sappho's famous hendecasyllabic lines – though they are not true ‘Sapphic’ verses, a very strict form which is not well adapted to English (as you may be able to tell from my attempt at the top of this review).
Aaron Poochigian, in a selected edition for Penguin Classics, takes a different approach. ‘Sappho did not compose free verse,’ he chides, perhaps with one eye on Carson, ‘and free-verse translations, however faithful they may be to her words, betray her poems by their very nature.’ Poochigian's version of the stanzas above goes like this:
I think that's pretty great. It takes much more liberties with Sappho's actual words but, to the extent that it produces a sensual thrill in English, it more faithfully reproduces the effect that Sappho had on her original audience. At least, to me it does. Poochigian's selection, called Stung with Love, is much shorter than the other two I read, but a very good encapsulation of her qualities. It also has by far the best introduction, a brilliant essay which puts Sappho in her context extremely well. And because it's the most recently published, it's also able to include the magic new Sappho poem discovered in 2013, written on a scrap of papyrus used to stuff a mummy.
BIGGER THAN A BIG MAN
‘Someone will remember us / I say / even in another time.’ Another fragment. The irony of this one upset me at first, because she should have survived in far greater quantities than she did. But even so, the thrill of hearing the voice of a woman who lived six centuries before Christ was enough to catch my breath over and over again. Generally speaking, women in antiquity are pretty silent. But Sappho isn't, and her influence, despite the meagre remains we have, is ginormous.
It might sound hyperbolic to claim that all modern love poetry is inherited from Sappho, but in fact there's a very real sense in which that's true – so great was her reputation among Classical writers and the Europeans who, in turn, studied them, that it's quite possible to trace a direct line from Sappho, through Catullus, to the Romantic poets and from them to contemporary pop lyrics. Every song about the pain of unrequited love owes something to Sappho's Fragment 31, for example – ideas now so clichéd that we forget they have an ancestry at all. That's just natural, surely – just the way people speak? But no, it isn't natural, it's Sappho. She's part of our inheritance, part of our language. She's under our tongue.
•If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, tr. Anne Carson, Virago 2002
•Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments, tr. Aaron Poochigian, Penguin 2015
SAPPHICS FOR SAPPHO
Each ellipsis teases, inviting dreams – dreams
Formed from torn papyruses' single words. Bare,
Lonely scrawls of sigmas and psis that sing, still,
Sticky with meaning.
Fragments all. What's left is the one percent, rich,
Rare. When Alexandria burned, the whole world
Choked to breathe the smoke of the ninety-nine. Now,
Desperate to get you
Back, we trawl millennia-old unearthed dumps,
Hunting out your clotted Aeolic strung lines.
Lone hendecasyllables' sounds that awed Greeks
After you quoted.
Questing, reading, marvelling – so we search on,
Poets seeking answers to questions all lost
Lovers ask. Your answers still reach us, drenched, fresh
From the Aegean.
A LIFE IN FRAGMENTS
Towards the end of the second century AD, in the last flickering light of classical Greece, a philosopher called Maximus, in a city on the Levantine coast, wrote a grammatical textbook about figures of speech. Casting around in old books for examples of how poets have described love, he writes: ‘Diotima says that Love flourishes when he has abundance but dies when he is in need: Sappho combined these ideas and called Love bitter-sweet and “ἀλγεσίδωρον”.’
So we have this one word that Sappho wrote, some eight centuries before Maximus was born. This is what we mean when we talk about her poetry existing in ‘fragments’. The Canadian poet Anne Carson translates this example as:
171
paingiver
Very often these remnants are quoted with no regard to any poetic quality, but rather in illustration of some grammatical point. Apollonius Dyscolus, for instance, writing again some time in the 100s AD, included a throwaway remark on variant dialects during an essay on pronouns. ‘The Aeolians,’ he said, ‘spell ὅς [‘his, hers, its’] with digamma in all cases and genders, as in Sappho's τὸν ϝὸν παῖδα κάλει.’ Again Carson's translation gives us just the phrase in question:
164
she summons her son
Carson's translation of Sappho's oeuvre is well subtitled ‘Fragments of Sappho’, since most of what's left is of this nature. It's certainly nice to have everything collected in this way in English, though it must be admitted that her book sometimes seems more an exercise in completionism than in poetic expression. That said, as other reviewers have pointed out, reading pages and pages of these deracinated terms (‘holder…crossable…I might go…downrushing’) can succeed in generating a certain hypnotic, Zen-like appeal.
Nevertheless, such things lose a lot by being read in isolation; the as it were archaeological pleasure of digging them out of their original context, in works of grammar or rhetoric, is completely absent. For that, the Loeb edition translated by David A. Campbell is far preferable, for all that he has no pretensions to being a poet, just because you get Sappho delivered in that context of other writers. The fonts used for the Greek are also much more readable in the Loeb. (The Carson edition does include the original Greek, and points for that – though there are some strange editorial…choices? mistakes? – such as printing ς for σ in all positions.)
MUSIC AND LYRICS
To the Ancient Greeks, Homer was simply ‘The Poet’ – and ‘The Poetess’ was Sappho. She was held in extraordinarily high esteem, which makes it the more frustrating that so much of her has been lost: ninety-nine percent, according to some experts. Only one or two poems remain that can be said to be more or less complete.
Her poetry is mainly ‘lyric’, that is, designed to be sung while strumming along on the lyre. Sappho was, in modern terms, a singer-songwriter; she was known to be an extremely talented musician, designing a new kind of lyre and perhaps even inventing the plectrum. When we read her poetry now, we have to remember that we're looking at something like a shredded collection of Bob Dylan or Georges Brassens lyrics, with no idea of how their meaning would have interacted with the music.
But however important the lost melodies, we do know that she was revered for the beauty of her phrasing. This is something translators struggle with. Fragment 146, a proverb about not wanting to take the bad with the good, is rendered literally by Campbell as ‘I want neither the honey nor the bee’ and by Carson, ‘Neither for me honey nor the honey bee’ – which is better, but consider the alliterative dazzle of the original:
μήτε μοι μέλι μήτε μέλισσα
(mēte moi meli mēte melissa)
Reading the Greek, even if you don't understand what any of the words mean, will often get you halfway there with Sappho. Say it out loud and you'll get a tingle, as it starts to dawn on you what all the fuss might have been about.
But the rest of the job has to be done by translators. The Loeb edition will not help you here: its prose translations are only a crib to help you study the original. Carson's approach is slightly conflicted. She quotes approvingly a well-known statement from Walter Benjamin to the effect that a translation should ‘find that intended effect…which produces in it the echo of the original’, i.e. that one should translate ideas and feelings rather than words. But she also claims to be trying to use ‘where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did’, which is the sort of thing that makes me instantly suspicious.
Here's her version of Fragment 2, which is one of the more complete poems we have, scratched on to a broken piece of pottery which has miraculously survived from the second century AD. The first stanza (an invocation to Aphrodite) is probably missing, but the next two run like this:
]
here to me from Krete to this holy temple
where is your graceful grove
of apple trees and altars smoking
with frankincense.
And it in cold water makes a clear sound through
apple branches and with roses the whole place
is shadowed and down from radiant-shaking leaves
sleep comes dropping.
This is not bad. I think the word order is unnecessarily foreign at times, but it does sound good and Carson even includes a few of Sappho's famous hendecasyllabic lines – though they are not true ‘Sapphic’ verses, a very strict form which is not well adapted to English (as you may be able to tell from my attempt at the top of this review).
Aaron Poochigian, in a selected edition for Penguin Classics, takes a different approach. ‘Sappho did not compose free verse,’ he chides, perhaps with one eye on Carson, ‘and free-verse translations, however faithful they may be to her words, betray her poems by their very nature.’ Poochigian's version of the stanzas above goes like this:
Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple
Where apple-orchard's elegance
Is yours, and smouldering altars, ample
Frankincense.
Here under boughs a bracing spring
Percolates, roses without number
Umber the earth and, rustling,
The leaves drip slumber.
I think that's pretty great. It takes much more liberties with Sappho's actual words but, to the extent that it produces a sensual thrill in English, it more faithfully reproduces the effect that Sappho had on her original audience. At least, to me it does. Poochigian's selection, called Stung with Love, is much shorter than the other two I read, but a very good encapsulation of her qualities. It also has by far the best introduction, a brilliant essay which puts Sappho in her context extremely well. And because it's the most recently published, it's also able to include the magic new Sappho poem discovered in 2013, written on a scrap of papyrus used to stuff a mummy.
BIGGER THAN A BIG MAN
‘Someone will remember us / I say / even in another time.’ Another fragment. The irony of this one upset me at first, because she should have survived in far greater quantities than she did. But even so, the thrill of hearing the voice of a woman who lived six centuries before Christ was enough to catch my breath over and over again. Generally speaking, women in antiquity are pretty silent. But Sappho isn't, and her influence, despite the meagre remains we have, is ginormous.
It might sound hyperbolic to claim that all modern love poetry is inherited from Sappho, but in fact there's a very real sense in which that's true – so great was her reputation among Classical writers and the Europeans who, in turn, studied them, that it's quite possible to trace a direct line from Sappho, through Catullus, to the Romantic poets and from them to contemporary pop lyrics. Every song about the pain of unrequited love owes something to Sappho's Fragment 31, for example – ideas now so clichéd that we forget they have an ancestry at all. That's just natural, surely – just the way people speak? But no, it isn't natural, it's Sappho. She's part of our inheritance, part of our language. She's under our tongue.
Read
June 14, 2020You came, and I was longing for you; you cooled my heart which was burning with desire. —Sappho, 48
I fell by the hands of Cyprian Aphrodite . . . —Alcaeus, 380
The golden-shining attendant of Aphrodite . . . —Sappho or Alcaeus, 23
__________
Learn the story of Admetus, my friend: love the good and keep away from the worthless. —Sappho or Alcaeus, 25C
__________
The only thing bad about the two poet's works in this volume is that more did not survive . . .
I wish . . . —Sappho, 22
__________
Testimonia (Sappho)
She has been accused by some of being irregular in her ways and a woman-lover. In appearance she seems to have been contemptible and quite ugly, being dark in complexion and of very small stature. (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus, 1800 fr. 1)
At the same time as these men (Alcaeus and Pittacus) flourished Sappho, a marvellous creature: in all recorded history I know of no woman who even came close to rivalling her as a poet. (Strabo, Geography, 13.2.3)
As for the Lesbian Alcaeus, you know how many revels he took part in, singing to the lyre of his yearning love for Sappho. (Athenaeus, 13.598cd)
Solon of Athens, son of Excestides, when his nephew sang a song of Sappho’s over the wine, liked the song and told the boy to teach it to him; and when someone asked why he was so eager about it, he said, ‘So that I may learn it and die.’ (Aelian, quoted by Stobaeus, Anthology)
The next style is the elegant or spectacular, preferring refinement to majesty. It always chooses the smoothest and softest of words, hunting for euphony and melodiousness and the sweetness that is derived from them. Secondly, it does not think it right tot place these words jus as they come or to fit them together thoughtlessly; rather, it judges what juxtapositions will be able to make the sounds more musical, and examines by what arrangements the words will produce the more attractive combinations, and so it tries to fit each word together, taking great pains to have everything planed and rubbed down smooth and all joints neatly dovetailed . . . These in my view are the characteristics of this style. As examples of it I take among the poets Hesiod and Sappho and Anacreon, among prose authors Isocrates the Athenian and his followers. (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demosthenes, 40)
Some say there are nine Muses: how careless! Look—Sappho of Lesbos is the tenth! (Palatine Anthology, Plato, On the Muses)
__________
Sappho
Sing to us of the violet-robed one . . . (21)
To stay awake all night . . . (23)
Remember . . . for we too did these things in our . . . youth. (24)
He seems as fortunate as the gods to me, the man who sits opposite you and listens nearby to your sweet voice and lovely laughter. Truly that sets my heart trembling in my breast. For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying. But all can be endured, since . . . (31)
Golden-crowned Aphrodite, if only I could obtain this lot. (33)
Towards you . . . my thoughts are unchangeable. (41)
And (there are) many golden bracelets and (perfumed?) purple robes, ornate trinkets and countless silver drinking-cups and ivory. (44)
As long as you wish . . . (45)
And I will lay down my limbs on soft cushions. (46)
Love shook my heart like a wind falling on oaks on a mountain. (47)
I do not know what I am to do; I am in two minds. (51)
Love has obtained for me the brightness and the beauty of the sun. (58)
Put lovely garlands around your locks . . . for the blessed Graces look rather on what is adorned with flowers and turn away from the ungarlanded. (81)
You put on many wreaths of violets and roses and (crocuses?) together by my side, and round your tender neck you put many woven garlands made from flowers and . . . with much flowery perfume, fit for a queen, you anointed yourself . . . and on soft beds . . . you would satisfy your longing (for?) tender . . . (94)
And a longing grips me to die and see the dewy, lotus-covered banks of Acheron . . . (95)
But for the girl who has hair that is yellower than a torch (it is better to decorate it) with wreathes of flowers in bloom. (98)
For I am overcome with desire for a [girl] because of slender Aphrodite. (102)
The bride with her beautiful feet . . . (103B)
The fairest of all the stars. (104)
Your form is graceful, your eyes gentle, and love streams over your beautiful face . . . Aphrodite has honoured you outstandingly. (112)
A tender girl picking flowers . . . (122)
(a) and you have forgotten me
(b) or you love some other (more?) than me (129)
Sweet-voiced girl . . . (153)
Far more sweet-sounding than a lyre . . . more golden than gold . . . (156)
. . . you and my servant Eros. (159)
I shall now sing these songs beautifully to delight my companions. (160)
That man seems to himself . . . (165)
It is midnight, and time goes by, and I lie alone. (168B)
__________
Alcaeus
I, the lyric poet of Latium, have brought Alcaeus to public notice: no lips had sung his songs before. —Horace
Maddened . . . infatuations . . . (10B)
Pour . . . flowery (perfume) . . . (36)
Pour perfume over my head . . . (50)
If a man keeps company with prositutes, these things happen to him. (117b)
Apple-cheeked girl . . . (261b)
Flowery (spring) . . . (286a)
That was a very (foolish) idea . . . (296)
For when the gates of spring are opened . . . (boys) scented with ambrosia . . . youths garlanded with hyacinth . . . (296)
Wine-drops fly from Teian cups (322)
. . . and a whirlwind carried off his wits completely. (336)
If you say what you like, you may hear what you do not like. (341)
And let him pour sweet perfume over our chests . . . (362)
And he sends his thoughts soaring high . . . (363)
I heard the flowery spring coming . . . (367)
Mix a bowl of the honey-sweet wine as quickly as possible . . . (367)
Violet-haired, holy, sweetly-smiling Sappho . . . (384)
The flower of soft autumn . . . (397)
__________
Sappho or Alcaeus
. . . as they danced on their soft feet around the lovely altar. (16)
Treading softly on the delicate flowers of the grass . . . (16)
April 22, 2011
I highly recommend this book. Loebs are generally wonderful, and this one proced to be also. It is the best work on Sappho I have read to date.
April 5, 2017
I love this stuff.
March 17, 2022
If I were rating this purely based on the Sappho portion, I would have given this another star, but since Alcaeus takes up a significant portion, I'm inclined to leave it at three. Sappho's works are beautifully evocative and resonate to this day and the glimpses of context collected were a nice insight into her life. Alcaeus shows some talent, but gets rather repetitive in how he describes drinking away one's problems.
June 26, 2019
"Solon of Athens, son of Execstides, when his nephew sang a song of Sappho's over the wine, liked the song and told the boy to teach it to him; and when someone asked why he was so eager about it, he said, 'So that I may learn it and die.'"
Aelian, Flor., 3.29.58
Aelian, Flor., 3.29.58
Read
May 4, 2021While I can't say I'm very moved by the fragments of Alcaeus who seems to enjoy writing drinking songs and references to Pittacus, the bits and pieces of Sappho are highly enjoyable. As most of what we have are fragments, down from nine books in antiquity, there's a swelling of sorrow in the reader from what beautiful emotive outpourings we have by the Lesbian poet—if only we had more! Glimpses at unluckyness in love, a jealousy, a tenderness which transcends the ages...
I'll have Longinus finish my review, with an excellent summation of her work:
"Are you not amazed how at one instant she summons, as though they were all alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, colour? Uniting contradictions, she is, at one and the same time, hot and cold, in her senses and out of her mind, for she is either terrified or at the point of death. The effect desired is that not one passion only should be seen in her, but a concourse of the passions. All such things occur in the case of lovers, but it is, as I said, the selection of the most striking of them and their combination into a single whole that has produced the singular excellence of the passage."
I'll have Longinus finish my review, with an excellent summation of her work:
"Are you not amazed how at one instant she summons, as though they were all alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, colour? Uniting contradictions, she is, at one and the same time, hot and cold, in her senses and out of her mind, for she is either terrified or at the point of death. The effect desired is that not one passion only should be seen in her, but a concourse of the passions. All such things occur in the case of lovers, but it is, as I said, the selection of the most striking of them and their combination into a single whole that has produced the singular excellence of the passage."
February 28, 2015
While I can't say I'm very moved by the fragments of Alcaeus who seems to enjoy writing drinking songs and references to Pittacus, the bits and pieces of Sappho are highly enjoyable. As most of what we have are fragments, down from nine books in antiquity, there's a swelling of sorrow in the reader from what beautiful emotive outpourings we have by the Lesbian poet—if only we had more! Glimpses at unluckyness in love, a jealousy, a tenderness which transcends the ages...
I'll have Longinus finish my review, with an excellent summation of her work:
"Are you not amazed how at one instant she summons, as though they were all alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, colour? Uniting contradictions, she is, at one and the same time, hot and cold, in her senses and out of her mind, for she is either terrified or at the point of death. The effect desired is that not one passion only should be seen in her, but a concourse of the passions. All such things occur in the case of lovers, but it is, as I said, the selection of the most striking of them and their combination into a single whole that has produced the singular excellence of the passage."
--AF
I'll have Longinus finish my review, with an excellent summation of her work:
"Are you not amazed how at one instant she summons, as though they were all alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, colour? Uniting contradictions, she is, at one and the same time, hot and cold, in her senses and out of her mind, for she is either terrified or at the point of death. The effect desired is that not one passion only should be seen in her, but a concourse of the passions. All such things occur in the case of lovers, but it is, as I said, the selection of the most striking of them and their combination into a single whole that has produced the singular excellence of the passage."
--AF
February 28, 2014
If anyone wants to become acquainted with Sappho--through her writing-- then this is the book! It is a very scholarly book, well researched, having all her poems and fragments of poems. Especially appreciated is the simple, literal translation, which helps,if one wishes, to identify the Greek word with the English, enabling one to look up the Greek word in a Greek lexicon. Sappho's poems still have meaning for us, as her poetry addresses the same issues facing us today: saying goodbye to a dear friend; old age and Art; scorned love; a mothers love for her child and marriage rites are some that impressed me.
January 30, 2015
Little does the reader know that today very little material survives from either Sappho (pronounced - Sap-foe) or Alcaeus. Whatever exists is in this volume and stresses the loss we have suffered. These were two incredibly talented artists who deserve their reputation as foremost poets of the ancient world. That being said, most of the material consists in a collection of phrase remnants or references or allusions to their work by ancient academics. You may find their total extant material in another book. However, I must say that knowing the pronunciation of the original ancient Greek certainly brings out the charm of Sappho in her cadence.
January 19, 2014
In general the Loeb books are great. Nice literal translations with the original beside them. There were a few poems in here that got put under the section for one poet or the other that were of contested authorship but that didn't get put into the section for that instead. Which was a little odd. Presumably there was a reason given at some point and I guess I just missed it? If not, it's kind of strange.
Want to read
May 28, 2010Sappho in particular
December 4, 2014
Fragments of poetry are greatly dissatisfying - read for the ancient commentary.
April 10, 2021
Interesting to read the Fragments and then comparison
March 27, 2017
If you want all there is of Sappho, you buy this book. I regret there's so little left, apparently down to a total lack of mediaeval copying by monks, maybe from Xian homophobia but if she was extant in the Byzantine empire fairly late in its history, maybe not. I doubt anything more complete will come out of any refuse pit in Egypt, so this is it. The poetry shines through the translation of the one complete poem.
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