Such treatment of the text is closer to adaptation than translation, constructing a new poem out of the fragments of Sappho’s writing. When translating fragments, Barnard connects separated pieces of text without indicating any break in the English. Meter falls by the wayside in this translation instead, Barnard prioritizes what she calls Sappho’s “fresh colloquial directness of speech.” Barnard translates the vast majority of Sappho’s surviving works, including texts which are highly fragmentary.
Mary Barnard ’s 1958 publication of “Sappho: A New Translation” revolutionized English translation of Sappho. However, he translated only a fraction of Sappho’s corpus, and for the rest we must look elsewhere.
Some, men marching some would say ships but I sayĮven taking this tendency toward awkwardness into account, Lattimore’s translation is excellent. On the black earth is an array of horsemen Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen Take, for example, his rendering of the first stanza of one of Sappho’s most famous texts: One drawback of this approach is that by replicating the structure of the Greeks, Lattimore’s translation has a sense of strangeness and occasionally even awkwardness, which those who first heard Sappho sing would not have heard. The resulting translation maintains the tension in Sappho’s work between the strict meter she uses and the much-praised directness of her speech. Best known for his translations of the Homeric epics, Lattimore’s style is characterized by a close attention to the syntax and meter of the original and the replication of these qualities in English as much as is possible. Richmond Lattimore ’s anthology “Greek Lyrics,” first published in 1955, includes nine texts attributed to Sappho, though in one case he acknowledges that this attribution is questionable. In this article, I review four translations of Sappho produced over the past six decades. While translators of Sappho today as a rule avoid such censorship of her work, modern translations nevertheless differ widely. Until recent decades, however, English translations of Sappho have frequently obscured more than they revealed, heterosexualizing her expressions of desire to suit the sensibilities of their audience. Translation has been intimately bound up with the reception of Sappho’s poetry for centuries. Yet, for the majority of Sappho’s readers over the millennia, her poetry, composed in the Aeolic dialect, has always been inaccessible in the original language. (Courtesy of Poem, Sweet Poem)įew poets in human history have inspired such lasting devotion as Sappho. Excerpts from “If Not, Winter” by Anne Carson.
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