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A review by rravenii
Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments by Sappho
4.0
“‘Maidenhead, maidenhead, where have you gone?’ / ‘I shall never, ever join you again.’”
Second read through. Lost a star because the translation bugged me in a few places, particularly the use of “ventricles” instead of “heart” (“kardia”) in Fragment 31 (“That fellow strikes me as a god’s double…”). It’s so jarring. I have next to zero knowledge about Greek so I don’t know how justified he was in that choice (which he briefly explains in the notes), but in reading some dozen other (and older) translations, I feel I’ve been robbed! Penguin Classics, I trusted you!
-
Less “review”, rather mere notes:
That poem in particular is a special one as I only bought this book after John Donne’s Sappho to Philaenis piqued my curiosity. I wondered how some rabid Anglican cleric from the 16-17th c. captured a heated jealous desire by a woman for another woman SO accurately. How many women’s diaries did he validate? How did he express feelings I didn’t know I had? Wow.
-
Donne echoes and builds on the first stanza of Fragment 31, which is here translated as such:
”That fellow strikes me as a god’s double,
Couched with you face to face, delighting
In your warm manner, your amiable
Talk and inviting [laughter]”
and here is Donne, elaborating on that covetousness:
“…thou art so fair,
As, gods, when gods to thee I do compare,
Are graced thereby; and to make blind men see,
What things gods are, I say they are like to thee.
…
Plays some soft boy with thee, oh there wants yet
A mutual feeling which should sweeten it.
…
Thy body is a natural paradise,
in whose self, all pleasure lies,
Nor needs perfection; why shouldst thou then
Admit the tillage of a harsh rough man?”
My mind is so poisoned that I cannot help but imagine Donne had read Ovid on his Macbook and wanted to write AU fanfiction with his OTP Sappho x Philaenis. hashtag girlboss. Kyrie eleison.
Second read through. Lost a star because the translation bugged me in a few places, particularly the use of “ventricles” instead of “heart” (“kardia”) in Fragment 31 (“That fellow strikes me as a god’s double…”). It’s so jarring. I have next to zero knowledge about Greek so I don’t know how justified he was in that choice (which he briefly explains in the notes), but in reading some dozen other (and older) translations, I feel I’ve been robbed! Penguin Classics, I trusted you!
-
Less “review”, rather mere notes:
That poem in particular is a special one as I only bought this book after John Donne’s Sappho to Philaenis piqued my curiosity. I wondered how some rabid Anglican cleric from the 16-17th c. captured a heated jealous desire by a woman for another woman SO accurately. How many women’s diaries did he validate? How did he express feelings I didn’t know I had? Wow.
-
Donne echoes and builds on the first stanza of Fragment 31, which is here translated as such:
”That fellow strikes me as a god’s double,
Couched with you face to face, delighting
In your warm manner, your amiable
Talk and inviting [laughter]”
and here is Donne, elaborating on that covetousness:
“…thou art so fair,
As, gods, when gods to thee I do compare,
Are graced thereby; and to make blind men see,
What things gods are, I say they are like to thee.
…
Plays some soft boy with thee, oh there wants yet
A mutual feeling which should sweeten it.
…
Thy body is a natural paradise,
in whose self, all pleasure lies,
Nor needs perfection; why shouldst thou then
Admit the tillage of a harsh rough man?”
My mind is so poisoned that I cannot help but imagine Donne had read Ovid on his Macbook and wanted to write AU fanfiction with his OTP Sappho x Philaenis. hashtag girlboss. Kyrie eleison.