The original was preserved in the Orations of Maximus of Tyre: Each version reflects a slightly different view of love, of Sappho, of what Sappho should sound like to our foreign ears, and of what makes an effective poem. The translations, though all from a relatively compact period, show a surprising range emotionally (from wonderment to agony and various places in between) and technically (from an emphasis on the fragmentary and dislocated to attempts at recreating the formal structure of the original). I think earlier periods prized these surviving remnants of the past, but were more likely to see in them antiquarian rather than aesthetic interest the twentieth century, under the influence of Imagism and other poetics that favor brevity and fragmentation, were more likely to find a remnant like this a satisfactory poem on its own.Īnd it is indeed a vivid and emotionally complete statement. The oldest version here from my ever-growing collection of Sappho translations is only from the late 1950s. This time I thought it would be interesting to see the many possibilities of one short fragment – really just a simile, about love but grand in the epic style, that survives from an otherwise unknown poem. The last time I held a Sapphopalooza, we looked at six different versions of what is possibly her only surviving complete poem, the Hymn to Aphrodite.
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