This is one of my old school books from Classics, before there were such boring things as women's studies. I think I will read it again and bid it goodbye soon.


Amazon Editorial Review

The hundred poems and fragments here translated into modern English constitute all of Sappho that survives, and effectively bring to life the woman whom the Greeks consider to be their greatest lyric poet. Sappho gives us flashes of vivid comment and description - forthright attacks on her enemies, diologues with her friends, and exasperated exchanges with Aphrodite, the goddess who was both enemy and ally. The poems are highly personal and emotional portrayals of the world she lived in twenty-five hundred years ago. Mary Barnard's translations are lean, incisive, direct. As a result, she has rendered the beloved poet's verse, long the bane of translators, more authentically than anyone else in English.

This book has been with me for an awfully long time, since Classics class in college. I enjoyed going through it again this past week. It brought up a few memories of that excellent class. I remember really admiring the intellectual vitality of my professor, and thinking that I would really like to be like her in later life. She was past her fifties and just incredible. At that time, I thought this was remarkable.

I liked these quiet, short verses. They often pack quite a punch. I liked them so much in fact that I have ordered a biography of the translator Mary Barnard, friend of Ezra Pound.

This one reminds me most of my youthful love life:

With his venom

Irresistible
and bittersweet

that loosener
of limbs, Love

reptile-like
strikes me down

Verse 53

Here's a piquant verse for a woman my present age:

Tonight I've watched

The moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone

Verse 64

And then there's the wise saying sort of poem:

Experience shows us

Wealth unchaperoned
by Virtue is never
an innocuous neighbor

Verse 86

I have Mary Barnard's memoir and I will read more of her poems and translations. I am letting this book go. It's in beautiful condition and I hope the next reader will enjoy it.

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