Hackett (2016) p/b 100pp £12.50 (ISBN 9781624664670)
In 2002 Stanley Lombardo published translations of 73 of the 200-plus poems and fragments of Sappho. He now adds to these all the fragments omitted from the original edition, however tiny, and including the new papyrus discoveries of 2004 and 2014. He also adds a section on ‘The Elegiac Sappho’, with translations of later Greek and Latin elegiac verse where Sappho is either the supposed author or the subject, including Ovid’s letter ‘Sappho to Phaon’ from the Heroides. There is an exemplary Introduction by Pamela Gordon in which she explains how Sappho’s fragments have survived and suggests fruitful approaches to reading the surviving poems (‘Reading Among the Ruins’). She writes sensibly on how we might approach the issue of homoeroticism, on whether Lesbian Sappho was a lesbian, and she gives an excellent up-to-date bibliography pointing to further reading.
L. keeps to the standard numeration of the fragments in his translations, which is a help to informed readers who can thus find the poems quickly. He is quite conservative in any conjectural reconstruction of fragmentary passages, and gaps in the received Greek text are indicated in the translations only by proportionate white space, either between words in a line or between the lines themselves. All this is good.
And the lucid translations read well. Here is fr. 2:
….and out of Crete, come to me here
in your sacred precinct, to your grove
of apple trees and your altars
smoking with incense,
where cold water flows babbling
through the branches, the whole place
shadowed with roses, sleep adrift down
from the shimmering leaves,
horses grazing in a meadow abloom
with spring flowers, and where
the breezes blow sweetly….
Here is Sappho writing on old age: fr. 58, a poem reconstructed in the wake of a papyrus discovery at the University of Cologne in 2004:
My heart is heavy, and my knees will not carry me,
though once they were light as a fawn’s in the dance.
I lament this constantly, but what can be done?
There is no way for a human not to grow old.
They always said rose-armed Dawn loved Tithonus
and took him away, a beautiful young boy,
to the edge of the world. But in time grey old age
seized him, even though he slept with an immortal.
I find myself with a number of quibbles where for me the translations are too often not quite close enough to the Greek. For instance in Sappho’s most famous poem, phainetai moi fr. 31, the opening ‘He seems to me equal to the gods’ (lit.) becomes ‘Look at him, just like a god’. Why not ‘He seems to me …’, bringing in the personal element immediately?
Sometimes words are missed out, as in fr. 96 (ll. 15–16), where ‘remembering gentle Atthis with yearning’ becomes ‘remembering her beloved Atthis’, with aganas, ‘gentle’, omitted. In fr. 96 (l. 5), ‘most of all she delighted in your song’ becomes ‘she loved the way you moved in the dance’, which is too loose and leaves out malista, ‘most of all’.
There are even errors: fr. 44 ll. 13–14 is translated ‘The Trojan women yoked mules to their gliding chariots’, where Iliadai should surely be not women but ‘sons of Ilos’ (founder of Troy), i.e. Trojan men.
But I write as one who has long loved these poems in the original, so perhaps I am being over-critical, altogether too nit-picking. It is certainly very good indeed to have a complete and up-to-date Sappho for the non-specialist reader, and especially one with such an intelligent and helpful Introduction to the poet herself.
Jenny March