Uncovering Writing

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed Sappho’s poetry via this edition with a preface by Carol Ann Duffy and notes and commentary by Aaron Poochigian. Duffy tells us of Sappho’s impact on so many, including Plato, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, Donne, Pope, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and today’s writers. Over 2,600 years of impact is pretty impressive. Horace said that Sappho’s poems merited sacred admiration and Plato honored her as the 10th Muse (p. vii). I couldn’t agree more.

So much of her writing was lost during before the common era started, but even what little remains has such presence and impact. In the 3rd and 2nd century BCE, Sappho’s remaining works were collected into 9 books (p. xliii). Cicero, Catullus and Horace would have had access to these works but by the 12th-14th c. CE, her works were almost gone. SWhat remains of her works today are fragments here and there as well as some summaries, commentaries and quotes from other classical authors which have survived.

Poochigian has a facing page for each translated fragment that situates the poem. Even better, for those of us who care about language, he tries to explain his translation project, referring to the original Greek (when it is known) and telling us the choices he makes and does not make. This slowed my reading a bit, but it added so much wondrous context. Some of this would be the context that Plato, Aristotle and Horace knew as common knowledge that influenced their thoughts on her work.

In his introduction, Poochigian says “Sappho is important because she gives a fully human voice to female desire for the first time in Western literature” (p. xxxix). This is partly a reference to Fragment 16, which was my favorite piece (pp. 58-59). It tells the story of Helen of Troy, not as a passive object stolen by Paris but as an active agent who chooses to leave her husband and follow her own desire. Not only is the poem wonderful, but the discussion of the translation on the facing page is so interesting.