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justabean_reads 's review for:
The Complete Poems of Sappho
by Sappho
Very interesting to read this back to back with the Carson translation. There were things I liked better about this version (of course it has one of the new poems in it), and things I felt Carson added to more. Really, it's well worth reading both of them.
I found that Carson's translations were a little more poetic, but Barnstone often had clearer meaning, and sometimes the plainer language felt truer to me. I really liked how Carson included the original Greek to show what we were extrapolating from, and had all the brackets and ellipses in the English translation, because it was very educational, but it also, for me distracted a bit from the poetry, whereas Barnstone stripping most of that made Sappho more approachable.
This edition has a nice introduction about how Sappho has been interpreted through history, with lots of quotes and examples, and in edition to the usual ancient quotes includes some 20th-century poetry about her as well.
I wasn't sure why Barnstone chose to organise the poems by theme rather than fragment number, though it mostly worked. However, the notes at the back were still by fragment number, which meant a lot of flipping back and forth trying to find things. Carson's notes were generally better anyway.
If you had to read only one translation, I would be hard pressed to decide which of the two, but might come slightly in favour of Carson.
I found that Carson's translations were a little more poetic, but Barnstone often had clearer meaning, and sometimes the plainer language felt truer to me. I really liked how Carson included the original Greek to show what we were extrapolating from, and had all the brackets and ellipses in the English translation, because it was very educational, but it also, for me distracted a bit from the poetry, whereas Barnstone stripping most of that made Sappho more approachable.
This edition has a nice introduction about how Sappho has been interpreted through history, with lots of quotes and examples, and in edition to the usual ancient quotes includes some 20th-century poetry about her as well.
I wasn't sure why Barnstone chose to organise the poems by theme rather than fragment number, though it mostly worked. However, the notes at the back were still by fragment number, which meant a lot of flipping back and forth trying to find things. Carson's notes were generally better anyway.
If you had to read only one translation, I would be hard pressed to decide which of the two, but might come slightly in favour of Carson.