Sappho: A New Translation

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Sappho: A New Translation
Barnard sappho cover.jpg
Author Mary Barnard
LanguageEnglish
GenrePoetry
Publisher University of California Press
Publication date
1958
ISBN 0-520-22312-8

Sappho: A New Translation is a 1958 book by Mary Barnard with a foreword by Dudley Fitts. Inspired by Salvatore Quasimodo's Lirici Greci (Greek Lyric Poets) 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.

Contents

Background

Mary Barnard studied at Reed College from 1928 to 1932, [1] where she was one of the few students to study ancient Greek. [2] In 1930 she was given a copy of Henry Thornton Wharton's translation of the poetry of Sappho as a birthday present. This inspired her to adapt fragments of Sappho, such as in "Love Poem", a four-line adaptation of the twenty-eight-line "Ode to Aphrodite". [3] In 1933, she began a correspondence with the poet Ezra Pound, sending him six of her poems. [4]

In 1950 Barnard was bedridden for six months after contracting hepatitis B; during this time she returned to studying Greek, [4] and was sent a copy of Salvatore Quasimodo's Italian-language anthology Lirici Greci (Greek Lyric Poets). [5] Inspired by this, and encouraged by Pound, to whom she sent early drafts, Barnard began to produce her own translations of Sappho's poetry. [5] Existing translations of Sappho's works were often inaccurate. In the poem "Static" Barnard complained of their inadequacies, describing them as "whiskered mumble / ment of grammarians: / Greek pterodactyls / and Victorian dodos". [6] She spent about two years working on her translation, [7] recalling in her memoir that each fragment went through "about forty versions". [8] Barnard completed her translation in 1953; it was published in 1958. [9]

Translation

To an army wife, in Sardis:

Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some, again,
will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.

This is easily proved: did
not Helen—she who had scanned
the flower of the world's manhood—

choose as first among men one
who laid Troy's honour in ruin?
warped to his will, forgetting

love due her own blood, her own
child, she wandered far with him.
So Anactoria, although you

being far away forget us,
the dear sound of your footstep
and light glancing in your eyes

would move me more than glitter
of Lydian horse or armored
tread of mainland infantry

Mary Barnard,
Sappho 16 Voigt = Sappho 41 Barnard

Sappho: A New Translation was published by the University of California Press. It is dedicated to Douglas and Mary Paige, [10] who had sent Barnard the copy of Lirici Greci which inspired her translation. [11] It comprises a foreword by Dudley Fitts, one hundred poems in translation, a note on the translation by Barnard, a list of sources for the poems, with their corresponding number in John Maxwell Edmonds' Loeb Classical Library edition, a bibliography and index. [10] Barnard's translation is based on the Greek text of Edmonds' Loeb edition. [12] She groups the poems into six sections, [13] which rather than following the conventional order she arranges to give a narrative of Sappho's life from youth to old age. [14] Within Part One, focused on Sappho's youth, Barnard further organises the poems by time of day, with the first poem in the section set at dawn and the last at night. [15] Two poems precede the main six sections as a programmatic preface. [16]

Barnard's translations render Sappho's poetry in contemporary language, in contrast to the old-fashioned diction preferred by previous translators. [17] In some cases Barnard alters or combines fragments. [18] Where the surviving Greek text is too fragmentary to fully translate, she gives a conjectured reconstruction, [19] for instance in the fourth and fifth stanzas of Sappho 16. [20] The poems are given titles, [18] and translated in free verse. [21] She does not always retain the stanzaic structure of Sappho's poems: she often uses three-line stanzas where Sappho's poems are in four-line Sapphics, [18] while for Sappho 130 she divides a two-line fragment, which survives only through being quoted by the second century AD grammarian Hephaestion, over six lines and three stanzas. [20]

Barnard's free verse was based on her principle of the "balanced line", [22] in which each line could be divided in two, and each half had the same metrical weight. [23] For example, her translation of Sappho 94 Voigt (Sappho 42 Barnard) is headed "I have had not one word from her", which Sarah Barnsley scans as ◡ ◡ – – / – – ◡ ◡ : the syllables are exactly symmetrical. [24] The titles added by Barnard are mostly exactly balanced in this manner, while in the body of the poems the balance is more approximate. [25]

Reception

Barnard's translation was both commercially and critically successful. Initially she had difficulty finding a publisher. [26] Both Anchor Books and Viking Press rejected the manuscript because they did not think that it was commercially viable. As Barnard recalled in her memoir, "[Anchor] liked the poems, or so they said, but Sappho would never sell". [27] Despite these difficulties, the translation had sold 100,000 copies by 1994 [28] and as of 2013 had been continuously in print with the University of California Press for 55 years. [29]

Early reviewers criticized Barnard for choosing to translate into free verse. Vivian Mercier, reviewing for Poetry, and W. B. Stanford, in Hermathena, both complained that Barnard had not used more structured meters, [30] [12] while the reviewer in The Classical Outlook suggested that the translations would have been more memorable had they been in rhyming verse. [31] More recent critics have praised Barnard's prosody: in 1978, Anita Helle wrote in The Columbian that this was the "most important innovation" of Sappho: A New Translation. [32] The choice to translate Sappho into free verse rather than attempting a metrical imitation has been followed by many subsequent translators. [33]

In his review of Barnard's translation, Burton Raffel described Barnard's work as "as nearly perfect an English translation as one can find, a great translation, an immensely moving translation, complete, beautiful, deserving of endless praise". [34] The classicist Guy Davenport, who published his own translation of Sappho's work in 1965, called it "surely the best Greek translation in American literature". [35] In a 1994 review, Lorrie Goldensohn said that it was still one of the best English translations of Sappho's poetry. [36] Barnard's translation is particularly influential in the US, where according to Josephine Balmer it is "iconic". [37] It has been set to music twice, by the composers Sheila Silver and David Ward-Steinman. [38]

Barnard's translation has influenced many subsequent writers. Bruce Whiteman identifies the translations of Sappho's works by Davenport and Jim Powell following in Barnard's poetic lineage. [39] Josephine Balmer acknowledges Barnard as an inspiration for her own translation of Sappho's poetry. [40] The classicist Page duBois has credited reading Sappho: A New Translation as a teenager with inspiring her to learn ancient Greek. [41]

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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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lyric poetry</span> Formal type of poetry

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Catullus 51 is a poem by Roman love poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BC). It is an adaptation of one of Sappho's fragmentary lyric poems, Sappho 31. Catullus replaces Sappho's beloved with his own beloved Lesbia. Unlike the majority of Catullus' poems, the meter of this poem is the sapphic meter. This meter is more musical, seeing as Sappho mainly sang her poetry.

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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.

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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.

Melinno was a Greek lyric poet. She is known from a single surviving poem, known as the "Ode to Rome". The poem survives in a quotation by the fifth century AD author Stobaeus, who included it in a compilation of poems on manliness. It was apparently included in this collection by mistake, as Stobaeus misinterpreted the word ρώμα in the first line as meaning "strength", rather than being the Greek name for the city of Rome.

<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">Brothers Poem</span> Poem written by Sappho

The Brothers Poem or Brothers Song is a series of lines of verse attributed to the archaic Greek poet Sappho, which had been lost since antiquity until being rediscovered in 2014. Most of its text, apart from its opening lines, survives. It is known only from a papyrus fragment, comprising one of a series of poems attributed to Sappho. It mentions two of her brothers, Charaxos and Larichos; the only known mention of their names in Sappho's writings, though they are known from other sources. These references, and aspects of the language and style, have been used to establish her authorship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sappho 94</span> Fragment of poem written by Sappho

Sappho 94, sometimes known as Sappho's Confession, is a fragment of a poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho. The poem is written as a conversation between Sappho and a woman who is leaving her, perhaps in order to marry, and describes a series of memories of their time together. It survives on a sixth-century AD scrap of parchment. Scholarship on the poem has focused on whether the initial surviving lines of the poem are spoken by Sappho or the departing woman, and on the interpretation of the eighth stanza, possibly the only mention of homosexual activities in the surviving Sapphic corpus.

Yopie Prins is the Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her fields of research include classical reception, comparative literature, historical poetics, lyric theory, translation studies, Nineteenth-Century poetry, English Hellenism, and Victorian poetry.

<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.

Josephine Balmer is a British poet, translator of classics and literary critic. She sets the daily Word Watch and weekly Literary Quiz for The Times.

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.

References

  1. Barnsley 2013b, p. xv.
  2. Barnsley 2013b, p. 65.
  3. Barnsley 2013a, p. 76.
  4. 1 2 Donahue 2009.
  5. 1 2 Piantanida 2021, p. 110.
  6. Christy 1994, p. 29.
  7. Gordon 1994, pp. 172.
  8. Barnard 1984, p. 283.
  9. Gordon 1994, p. 174.
  10. 1 2 Barnard 1958.
  11. Barnard 1984, p. 281.
  12. 1 2 Stanford 1958, p. 83.
  13. Balmer 2013, p. 96.
  14. Christy 1994, pp. 31–34.
  15. Christy 1994, p. 36.
  16. Christy 1994, p. 34.
  17. Prins 1996, pp. 64–65.
  18. 1 2 3 Goff & Harloe 2021, p. 396.
  19. Prins 1996, p. 66.
  20. 1 2 Englert 1999.
  21. Christy 1994, p. 33.
  22. Barnsley 2013b, pp. 117–118.
  23. Barnsley 2013b, pp. 107–108.
  24. Barnsley 2013b, pp. 119–120.
  25. Barnsley 2013b, p. 120.
  26. Barnsley 2013a, p. 85.
  27. Barnard 1984, p. 289.
  28. Reed College 2001.
  29. Barnsley 2013a, p. 71.
  30. Mercier 1959, p. 189.
  31. R. M. 1960, p. 33.
  32. Helle 1978.
  33. Grover 2017.
  34. Raffel 1965, p. 236.
  35. Barnsley 2013b, p. 89.
  36. Goldensohn 1994, p. 13.
  37. Balmer 2013, p. 49.
  38. Barnsley 2013b, p. 124.
  39. Whiteman 2014, p. 683.
  40. Balmer 2013, p. 73.
  41. Balmer 2013, pp. 53–54.

Works cited

Further reading