This work combines representations of Sappho through the ages, in art and literature, from fragments of her own writing to the present-day. It offers narrative accounts of the way different periods have interpreted Sappho's haunting story, from Ovid's poetry and classical statues to Roman mosaics.
A detailed up-to-date survey of the most important woman writer from Greco-Roman antiquity. Examines the nature and context of her poetic achievement, the transmission, loss and rediscovery of her poetry, and the reception of that poetry in cultures far removed from ancient Greece, including Latin America, India, China, and Japan.
An abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to questions about history and settlement. Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, you come to a road sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless eroticism tell us anything about settlement—about why we’re here in front of this sign? Mixing historical documents, oral histories, and experimental translations of the original lesbian poet’s works, this book combines documentary and speculation, surveying a century in reverse. This town is one of many with a classical name. Take it as a symbol: perhaps in a place that no longer exists, another kind of future might be possible.
This is the first collection of essays in English devoted to discussion of a newly recovered Sappho poem and two other incomplete texts on the same papyri. The contributions demonstrate how the "New Sappho" can be appreciated as a complete, gracefully spare poetic statement regarding the painful inevitability of death and aging.
Presents a Sappho by a poet and translator that treats the fragments as aesthetic wholes, complete in their fragmentariness, and which is also, as the translator puts it: 'ever mindful of performative qualities, quality of voice, changes of voice...'
This handbook is a guide to the reading of elegiac, iambic, personal and public poetry of early Greece. Intended as a teaching manual or as an aid for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, it presents the major scholarly debates affecting the reading of these poetic texts, such as the effect of genre, the question of the poetic persona, or the impact of modern literary theory.
Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even - by the Victorians - chaste headmistress of a girls' finishing school. Yet ironically, as Page DuBois shows, the historical poet herself remains elusive. We know that Sappho's contemporary Alcaeus described her as 'violet, pure, honey-smiling Sappho'; and that the rhetorician and philosopher Maximus of Tyre saw her, perhaps less enthusiastically, as 'small and dark'. We also know that her 7th/6th century BCE island of Lesbos was riven by tyrannical and aristocratic factionalism and that she was probably exiled to Sicily. Much of the rest is speculative. DuBois suggests that the value of Sappho lies elsewhere: in her remarkable verse, and in the poet's reception - one of the richest of any figure from antiquity. Offering nuanced readings of the poems, written in an archaic Aeolic dialect, DuBois skillfully draws out their sharp images and rhythmic melody. She further discusses the exciting discovery of a new verse fragment in 2004, and the ways in which Sappho influenced Catullus, Horace and Ovid, as well as later writers and painters.
A vivid, contemporary translation of the greatest Greek love poet—with a wealth of materials for understanding her work—by a prize-winning poet and translator Sappho’s thrilling lyric verse has been unremittingly popular for more than 2,600 years—certainly a record for poetry of any kind—and love for her art only increases as time goes on. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete poems, her mystique endures to be discovered anew by each generation, and to inspire new efforts at bringing the spirit of her Greek words faithfully into English. In the past, translators have taken two basic approaches to Sappho: either very literally translating only the words in the fragments, or taking the liberty of reconstructing the missing parts. Willis Barnstone has taken a middle course, in which he remains faithful to the words of the fragments, only very judiciously filling in a word or phrase in cases where the meaning is obvious. This edition includes extensive notes and a special section of “Testimonia”: appreciations of Sappho in the words of ancient writers from Plato to Plutarch. Also included are a glossary of all the figures mentioned in the poems, and suggestions for further reading.
"The Tenth Muse" sings to both sexes of desire, rapture, and sorrow. This concise collection of the ancient Greek poet's surviving works was assembled and translated by a distinguished classicist.