Reviews

"When she left me she wept profusely and told me, "Oh how we've suffered in all this. Psapfo, I swear I go unwillingly."

"Don't madden my mind"

"I cannot imagine in the future any girl who looks on the light of the sun who will have your skill and wisdom."

"Someone, I tell you, in another time, will remember us."

Sappho seems to have always been in love.
I absolutely adore this woman. And it's fucking weird to me to think of scholars sitting down and meticulously combing over her poems for analysis when,,,,,you literally just read it and vibe and relate and feel?

I loved all of the poems but some of my favorites were
Time of Youth; Seizure; Eros; To A Friend Gone, Remember; Return, Gongyla; As Long As There Is Breath; Abuse; Madden; Light; Face; No Oblivion; and To Hermis Who Guides The Dead.

My only complaint; it wasn't long enough. :|

adamcarrico91's review against another edition

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5.0

Come holy lyre, speak to me and become a voice!

stierwood's review against another edition

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historiography is such a silly sick joke- they spent millennia creating convoluted theories on why Sappho wasn't gay when the reality was so simple.

"someone, I tell you, in another time
will remember us"

and we did, we finally did!!!

kiradahlin's review against another edition

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4.0

Moon and women, No oblivion, I Shall, Eros og To eros har meg i et grip

spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition

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2.0

This review is of the translation by Willis Barnstone.

This is Sappho #102 (fr.102 Lobel-Page, fr.102 Voigt, fr.114 Diehl, fr.90 Bergk, fr.87 Cox):

Γλύκηα μᾶτερ, οὔ τοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἴστον
πόθῳ δάμεισα παῖδος ϝραδίναν δι’ Ἀφροδίταν.

Some people in reviews of Willis Barnstone's translation have mentioned that Barnstone's was a "heterosexual" translation, because Barnstone translated the word παῖς (here παῖδος) as "boy." I have to assume that none of those people know Ancient Greek, because the word παῖς can be either masculine or feminine depending on context, and no contextualising adjectives etc. are given in this fragment. A more accurate translation of the word παῖς in this context would be "youth."

Barnstone isn't nearly as controversial as Mary Barnard for adding titles to each poem, although he probably should be. This collection, unlike Barnstone's original translation, does not include all of the fragments, unfortunately, which is a detriment to the whole. Yes, this is a "pocket" edition, but there are so few surviving lines of Sappho that you could easily fit 650 of them into... [checks page numbers] 216 pages?! Never mind, I take it back; I'm not defending this nonsense.

The romanisation of Greek letters Barnstone uses also confused me. For example, he transliterates Ἀφροδῑ́τη as "Afroditi." This is... a choice. The letter φ (phi) is not typically romanised as f but rather ph, and η (eta) is almost always romanised as e. The commonly accepted English romanisation, Aphrodite, is actually correct. Writing -δῑ́τη as -diti in English means it would be pronounced /diːtiː/ (IPA), whereas -dite would be /daɪti/ (IPA).

He does transliterate Sappho's name as Psapfo, which was how she wrote her own name, Ψάπφω, in Aeolic Greek.

In the non-abridged version of Barnstone's translation, he writes that he is:

[...] still pondering on phi and eta, whether Greek phi = English ph or f, and whether Greek eta = e or i, and a few other enigma. My reasonable premise is that a literary translation is not a chart for imitating ancient phonemes. While it is fun to have an approximate knowledge of ancient Greek phonology, such knowledge is marginal in our pact with the original poet to be a poet in English faithful to song. [...] the phi in ancient Greek was not a voiceless bilabial fricative f but an aspirated plosive p, like the p in pot.

Our traditional preference for the Latin ph misleads us as a good emissary for a Greek utterance. Roman Latin construed the double consonant ph to represent the Greek aspirated p. It worked until approximately the fourth century BCE, when the aspirated Greek p evolved into a fricative f. In Latin the ph evolved into a fricative f, which is how it remains today. In English the initial ph reveals only that etymologically the word came to us through Latin from Greek, a nice trophy, but offering just f. [...] How can we hear an ancient Greek voice, since for most of us Latin ph fails? No way. English is not Greek. In modern tongues and by international phonetic convention, phi is not a plosive p but the voiceless bilabial fricative f. Hence, when the English name is not too sacred to change, I like to render phi as f rather than the Latin ph, keeping us close to Greek and escaping a Latin presence.

To be loyal to an ancient aspirated phi we should write pilosopy. Then, the initial p would be a plosive p and a bit closer to the classical and archaic phi. No one offers this nutty solution. Latin tongues don’t bother. Spanish gives us filosophia. Why are we loyal to a sign that no longer signifies an original sound in Greek? The strong tradition of shuffling Greek words through an adoptive Latin gives us Alcaeus, not Alkaios, for Sappho’s contemporary poet friend in Lesbos. I find the preponderance and authority of Latinization tough to swallow. As Greece becomes a vivid entity, it is easy to switch to Alkaios. Plato remains Plato, not Platon, the “broad-shouldered.” And when writing about Sappho, it is Sappho. But in her poems, she is Psapfo and, for all the reasons given above, not the mixed signal of Psappho.

First of all, there has been a standard English romanisation of Ancient Greek for a while, and the reason English adopts a more Latinate form is because English has greater Latin influence than Greek. Similarly to the idea that writing "pilosopy" would be ridiculous, so would be writing "fosforos," because the word phosphorus came to English by way of Latin phosphorus, which in turn was borrowed from Ancient Greek φωσφόρος. Sappho's writing almost entirely came to us via later authors recording her writing, so we call her Sappho (in English). Each language approximates. The best way to preserve the original pronunciation would be to write entirely in IPA, but that would only be readable to a small percentage of people.

One thing that would admittedly be cool is the idea of a translation of Sappho's surviving fragments into English, but only English words descended from Ancient Greek. The first two words of #102, for example, γλύκηα μᾶτερ, are from γλυκύς (sweet) and μήτηρ (mother): an English descendent of γλυκύς, via Modern Greek, is the prefix glyco-; for μήτηρ we could still use mother, which came to Modern English via Old English modor and is really only a cognate of the Ancient Greek, but the two words have a common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr. This would result in the Frankenstein-word glycomother.

Your move, Barnstone.

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