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4.47 AVERAGE
4.47 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
fast-paced
Beautiful poetry even in its fragments. I reared up several times :)
challenging
emotional
mysterious
fast-paced
The brackets and inclusion of original (surviving) Greek text definitely give this edition a weight that the first edition I read (Lombardo 2002) did. Looking at the Greek, you can see how many empty spaces and half-words remain, and so how much was truly lost. It also stops - well, slows- me from patching the fragments together into a new poem like a blackout poem. For example, if not for the brackets, I would read the lines in 71 "Some sweet song in honey voice, piercing breezes wet with dew" as a full phrase, when it is instead at least 4 incomplete phrases, ie "?]some sweet song, ?]in honey voice, ?]piercing breezes, ?]wet with dew". The pages at the end of the book with 8 poems a page that are only 1 word also drive home how little has survived.
Favorites: the full surviving one, of course, but also: 41, 58, 95, 104, 120, 130, 138, 147 of course, 168B
Favorites: the full surviving one, of course, but also: 41, 58, 95, 104, 120, 130, 138, 147 of course, 168B
i think it is very interesting to think how the (unintentional) fragmented and exclusionary nature of these poems possibly creates entirely different meanings and conclusions -- essentially an entire differenr body of work from the original; and i think the use of brakets to include the missing pieces is super cool
No idea how to evaluate this really. I’ve read like 5 books of poetry, and every time it’s been clear it’s not how my brain is really wired. This, though, has a bunch of incomprehensible gibberish sometimes— as an exercise I tried processing what was there. It’s just not how my brain works. And that feels like a pretty central tenet of consuming this, so I won’t rate it. Wouldn’t know what to rate it, otherwise. Some of the times it was moving, some of the time it was meaningless.
reflective
fast-paced
The remnants of Sappho's poems are so evocative that one could compose whole worlds in the spaces between her lines.
You have to give this a minimum of 4 stars otherwise you get your lesbian card taken away!!