If Not, Winter

Last updated

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho is a book by the Canadian classicist and poet Anne Carson, first published in 2002. It contains a translation of the surviving works of the archaic Greek poet Sappho, with the Greek text on facing pages, based on Eva-Maria Voigt's 1971 critical edition. Carson's translation closely follows the word-order of Sappho's Greek, and marks lacunae in the manuscripts with square brackets. If Not, Winter was widely praised and is considered a significant modern translation of Sappho's work.

Contents

Translation

  ]
  ]work
  ]face
  ]
  ]
  if not, winter
  ]no pain
  ]
]I bid you sing
of Gongyla, Abanthis, taking up
your lyre as (now again) longing
  floats around you,

you beauty. For her dress when you saw it
stirred you. And I rejoice.
In fact she herself once blamed me
  Kyprogeneia

because I prayed
this word:
I want

Anne Carson,
Sappho 22 Voigt
If Not, Winter

If Not, Winter is a translation of the poetry of Sappho by the poet, classicist, and translator Anne Carson, known for her works based on ancient Greek literature. [1] It was first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2002. The Folio Society produced an edition in 2019 illustrated by Jenny Holzer. The title comes from Carson's translation of Sappho's fragment 22. [2]

If Not, Winter uses the Greek text of Eva-Maria Voigt's Sappho and Alcaeus with a few variations. [2] Along with Carson's translations, with Greek text on facing pages, [3] the book has a short introduction, notes on the translation, a "who's who" of names in Sappho's poetry, and translations of selected ancient writings about Sappho. [4]

Carson's translations and notes draw on her previous work Eros the Bittersweet . [5] She attempts to follow the word order of the Greek text as closely as possible, and not to add any words which cannot be found in the surviving Greek texts of Sappho, such as personal pronouns and definite articles. [3] She uses square brackets in her translations to indicate lacunae in the original text, which she describes as "an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event"; [6] she also makes use of white space, breaking up some fragments over multiple lines. [5]

Reception

If Not, Winter was praised by reviewers for its translations. Dimitrios Yatromanolakis described Carson's translations as being of "remarkable accuracy and subtleness". [7] Both Emily Greenwood and Meryl Altman admired the translation for its minimalism; Greenwood describing it as "elegantly plain" [5] and Altman as "spare and elegant". [8] Margaret Reynolds called the translations "subtle, beautiful, precise, moving". [9] Elizabeth Robinson described Carson's translations of Sappho's poems "small miracles of vividness". [10] The poet and translator Bruce Whiteman was more critical, saying that though Carson is "a great poet (at times) and an accomplished classicist", her translations of Sappho "sound more like trots than fully achieved poems". [11] Carson's plain language and faithfulness to the surviving Greek fragments was noted by reviewers for being distinct from her other treatments of ancient Greek fragments, such as her reworking of Stesichorus's Geryoneis as Autobiography of Red . [12]

Some reviewers questioned how accessible If Not, Winter was for lay readers. Though she considered it "ideal" for readers with some familiarity with ancient Greek, Altman suggested that the book might be "frustrating" to those without. [8] However, Emily Wilson praised Carson's notes, saying that they "should enable even the Greekless reader to understand some of the most important textual problems in Sappho". [3] Writing for the Los Angeles Times , Jamie James likewise praised Carson's notes, though criticised her introduction as "the weakest part of the book", particularly Carson's discussion of Sappho's sexuality. [13]

If Not, Winter was considered a significant translation of Sappho on its publication: Yatromanolakis called it "perhaps the most significant" recent (as of 2004) English translation of Sappho. [2] Carol Moldaw judged it the first to supersede Mary Barnard's 1958 Sappho: A New Translation . [14] In the 2021 Cambridge Companion to Sappho, Barbara Goff and Katherine Harloe judge it "a defining translation" of the post-1980 era. [15] It has itself been translated into Spanish, published as the trilingual Greek/English/Spanish Si no, el invierno: Fragmentos de Safo. [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alcaeus</span> Greek lyric poet

Alcaeus of Mytilene was a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos who is credited with inventing the Alcaic stanza. He was included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. He was a contemporary of Sappho, with whom he may have exchanged poems. He was born into the aristocratic governing class of Mytilene, the main city of Lesbos, where he was involved in political disputes and feuds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sappho</span> Ancient Greek lyric poet (c. 630–c. 570 BC)

Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete. As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three epigrams formerly attributed to Sappho are extant, but these are actually Hellenistic imitations of Sappho's style.

Anne Patricia Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anactoria</span> Woman mentioned by Sappho

Anactoria is a woman mentioned by the Ancient Greek poet Sappho, who wrote in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE. Sappho names Anactoria as the object of her desire in a poem numbered as fragment 16. Another poem by Sappho, fragment 31, is traditionally called the "Ode to Anactoria", though no name appears in it. As portrayed in Sappho's work, she is likely to have been a young, aristocratic follower of Sappho's, of marriageable age. It is possible that fragment 16 was written in connection with her wedding to an unknown man. The name "Anactoria" has also been argued to have been a pseudonym, perhaps of a woman named Anagora from Miletus, or an archetypal creation of Sappho's imagination.

Women have made significant contributions to literature since the earliest written texts. Women have been at the forefront of textual communication since early civilizations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nossis</span>

Nossis was a Hellenistic poet from Epizephyrian Locris in Magna Graecia. Probably well-educated and from a noble family, Nossis was influenced by and claimed to rival Sappho. Eleven or twelve of her epigrams, mostly religious dedications and epitaphs, survive in the Greek Anthology, making her one of the best-preserved ancient Greek women poets, though her work does not seem to have entered the Greek literary canon. In the twentieth century, the imagist poet H. D. was influenced by Nossis, as was Renée Vivien in her French translation of the ancient Greek women poets.

Sappho 31 is an archaic Greek lyric poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho of the island of Lesbos. The poem is also known as phainetai moi after the opening words of its first line. It is one of Sappho's most famous poems, describing her love for a young woman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sappho 16</span> Fragment of a poem by Sappho

Sappho 16 is a fragment of a poem by the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. It is from Book I of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry, and is known from a second-century papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sappho 16 is a love poem – the genre for which Sappho was best known – which praises the beauty of the narrator's beloved, Anactoria, and expresses the speaker's desire for her now that she is absent. It makes the case that the most beautiful thing in the world is whatever one desires, using Helen of Troy's elopement with Paris as a mythological exemplum to support this argument. The poem is at least 20 lines long, though it is uncertain whether the poem ends at line 20 or continues for another stanza.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sappho 44</span> Fragment of a poem by Sappho

Sappho 44 is a fragment of a poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho, which describes the wedding of Hector and Andromache. Preserved on a piece of papyrus found in Egypt, it is the longest of Sappho's surviving fragments, and is written in epic style suiting its subject. The metre is glyconic with double dactylic expansion.

Edgar Lobel was a Romanian-British classicist and papyrologist who is best known for his four decades overseeing the publication of the literary texts among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and for his edition of Sappho and Alcaeus in collaboration with Denys Page. His contributions to the fields of papyrology and Greek studies were many and substantial, and Eric Gardner Turner believed that Lobel should "be acknowledged as a scholar to be mentioned in the same breath as Porson and Bentley, a towering genius of English scholarship."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ode to Aphrodite</span> Greek lyric poem by Sappho

The Ode to Aphrodite is a lyric poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho, who wrote in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, in which the speaker calls on the help of Aphrodite in the pursuit of a beloved. The poem survives in almost complete form, with only two places of uncertainty in the text, preserved through a quotation from Dionysius of Halicarnassus' treatise On Composition and in fragmentary form in a scrap of papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Midnight poem</span> Poem possibly written by Sappho

The midnight poem is a fragment of Greek lyric poetry preserved by Hephaestion. It is possibly by the archaic Greek poet Sappho, and is fragment 168 B in Eva-Maria Voigt's edition of her works. It is also sometimes known as PMG fr. adesp. 976 – that is, fragment 976 from Denys Page's Poetae Melici Graeci, not attributed to any author. The poem, four lines describing a woman alone at night, is one of the best-known surviving pieces of Greek lyric poetry. Long thought to have been composed by Sappho, it is one of the most frequently translated and adapted of the works ascribed to her.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tithonus poem</span> Poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho

The Tithonus poem, also known as the old age poem or the New Sappho, is a poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho. It is part of fragment 58 in Eva-Maria Voigt's edition of Sappho. The poem is from Book IV of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry. It was first published in 1922, after a fragment of papyrus on which it was partially preserved was discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt; further papyrus fragments published in 2004 almost completed the poem, drawing international media attention. One of very few substantially complete works by Sappho, it deals with the effects of ageing. There is scholarly debate about where the poem ends, as four lines previously thought to have been part of the poem are not found on the 2004 papyrus.

<i>Eros the Bittersweet</i> Book of criticism by Anne Carson

Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986) is the first book of criticism by the Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and classicist Anne Carson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sappho 2</span> Poem written by Sappho

Sappho 2 is a fragment of a poem by the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. In antiquity it was part of Book I of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry. Sixteen lines of the poem survive, preserved on a potsherd discovered in Egypt and first published in 1937 by Medea Norsa. It is in the form of a hymn to the goddess Aphrodite, summoning her to appear in a temple in an apple grove. The majority of the poem is made up of an extended description of the sacred grove to which Aphrodite is being summoned.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poetry of Sappho</span>

Sappho was an ancient Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos. She wrote around 10,000 lines of poetry, only a small fraction of which survives. Only one poem is known to be complete; in some cases as little as a single word survives. Modern editions of Sappho's poetry are the product of centuries of scholarship, first compiling quotations from surviving ancient works, and from the late 19th century rediscovering her works preserved on fragments of ancient papyri and parchment. Along with the poems which can be attributed with confidence to Sappho, a small number of surviving fragments in her Aeolic dialect may be by either her or her contemporary Alcaeus. Modern editions of Sappho also collect ancient "testimonia" which discuss Sappho's life and works.

This is a bibliography of works by the Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor Anne Carson.

Eva-Maria Voigt was a German classical philologist, known for her work on the archaic Greek poets Sappho and Alcaeus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sappho 96</span> Fragment of a poem by Sappho

Sappho 96 is a poem by the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. 37 lines of the fragment are preserved on a 6th-century parchment. The first twenty lines describe an imaginary scene in which an unnamed woman is struck by grief remembering an absent companion, Atthis; the remaining 17 lines, possibly originally a separate poem, reflects more generally on the foolishness of trying to compare human and divine beauty. As with other poems by Sappho such as poem 16 and 94, memory is a major theme.

<i>Sappho: A New Translation</i> 1958 poetry translation by Mary Barnard

Sappho: A New Translation is a 1958 book by Mary Barnard with a foreword by Dudley Fitts. Inspired by Salvatore Quasimodo's Lirici Greci and encouraged by Ezra Pound, with whom Barnard had corresponded since 1933, she translated 100 poems of the archaic Greek poet Sappho into English free verse. Though some early reviewers criticised Barnard's choice not to use a more structured meter, her translation was both commercially and critically successful, and her work has inspired subsequent translators of Sappho's poetry.

References

  1. ↑ Coles 2023, p. 2.
  2. 1 2 3 Yatromanolakis 2004, p. 266.
  3. 1 2 3 Wilson 2004.
  4. ↑ Greenwood 2005, p. 158.
  5. 1 2 3 Greenwood 2005, p. 159.
  6. ↑ Jansen 2019, p. 81.
  7. ↑ Yatromanolakis 2004, p. 271.
  8. 1 2 Altman 2004, p. 10.
  9. ↑ Reynolds 2003.
  10. ↑ Robinson 2015, p. 186.
  11. ↑ Whiteman 2014, p. 685.
  12. ↑ Coles 2023, p. 202.
  13. ↑ James 2002.
  14. ↑ Moldaw 2003.
  15. ↑ Goff & Harloe 2021, p. 403.
  16. ↑ Coles 2023, pp. 202, 291, n. 1.

Works cited

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.