John Myers O'Hara's translation of The Poems of Sappho captures the lyrical beauty and emotional depth of the ancient Greek poet. These fragments, filled with passion, longing, and love, offer a timeless glimpse into Sappho's world, resonating across centuries with their delicate grace and profound intimacy.
Sappho has become one of the touchstones of Western poetry, an icon and heroine for poets of any gender. For the simple reason that her poetry is very, very good. Well, not just good, it's genius, the real thing. Sappho has been cited by many many poets, including Lord Byron, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Alexander Pope, John Addison, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Graves, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Edna St Vincent Millay, and many contemporary poets. Sappho has become an icon for lesbian, gay and queer poets and writers. She has been the subject of much critical debate; in the 19th and early 20th centuries, questions of authorship were prominent; in the Eighties and Nineties, Sappho's poetry was absorbed into lesbian and queer theory and poetics.
Aside from the poem to Aphrodite, the rest of Sappho's work is in fragments, sometimes nothing more than a word or a phrase. Sometimes not even the words are complete. Yet her poetic voice shines through the fragments: very sensuous, ironic, self-deprecating, passionate, very lyrical. Her vocabulary is direct and simple, and sometimes colloquial. Edgar Lobel, one of Sappho's celebrated translators, said that her language was 'non-literary'. Her metaphors are powerful, sometimes lush - such as the ecstasy of love being compared to the wind in the oak trees on a mountainside.
The imagery in her poetry is of the natural world, in all its beauty and simplicity, its violence and cruelty. There are images of trees, mountains, streams, the sun and moon, stars, orchards, flowers, breezes, grass, nights, dawns, and the Pleiades. In her poetry one finds evocations of paradisal worlds, with streams, springs, apple trees, sunshine, roses, incense and gardens. Sappho's is a synaesthetic poetry, one which sets alive all the senses, as most of the best poetry does.
Includes a new, revised gallery of art featuring Sappho and art based on her works, an introduction and a bibliography.
Available as an E-book.
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Perhaps the most perilous and the most alluring venture in the whole field of poetry is that which Mr. Carman has undertaken in attempting to give us in English verse those lost poems of Sappho of which fragments have survived. The task is obviously not one of translation or of paraphrasing, but of imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction. It is as if a sculptor of to-day were to set himself, with reverence, and trained craftsmanship, and studious familiarity with the spirit, technique, and atmosphere of his subject, to restore some statues of Polyclitus or Praxiteles of which he had but a broken arm, a foot, a knee, a finger upon which to build. Mr. Carman's method, apparently, has been to imagine each lost lyric as discovered, and then to translate it; for the indefinable flavour of the translation is maintained throughout, though accompanied by the fluidity and freedom of purely original work.
The nine lyric poets were a canon of ancient Greek composers esteemed by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria as worthy of critical study. The most famous of which is probably Sappho, who was born sometime between 630 and 612 BC on the Greek island of Lesbos. The famous Library of Alexandria collected Sappho's poems into nine books, unfortunately these editions have been lost. Today only fragments of the poetess' work remains. These fragments are collected together here in this volume of The Poems of Sappho and Others along with fragments of the other Greek monodist lyric poets contemporary to Sappho. Altogether we find the poetry of Alcaeus, Pythermus, Anacreon, Anacreontea, Corrina, Telesilla, Praxilla, Erinna as well as Sappho in this volume of poetry translated by Walter Petersen. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.
The object of this book is to provide with a popular and a comprehensive edition of Sappho, containing all that is so far known of her unique personality and her incompatible poems
Little remains today of the writings of the archaic Greek poet Sappho (fl. late 7th and early 6th centuries B.C.E.), whose work is 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. Sappho is rated as the supreme poetess and is regarded in the same vein as Shakespeare and Homer the supreme poets.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.