Sappho

This pleasurable book contains Mary Barnard's translations of 100 of Sappho's poems and fragments, together with a brief and lively introduction by  Dudley Fitts and a brief and an informative afterword by Barnard.

Sappho is wonderful - the breadth of mood from joy, to sadness, to anger is captivating and the spareness of her language distills and strengthens the emotions expressed.  Here are a couple that I really like, followed by a great quote from Mary Barnard:

16.       YOU ARE THE HERDSMAN OF EVENING

Hesperus, you herd

homeward whatever

Dawn’s light dispersed

 

You herd sheep – herd

goats – herd children

home to their mothers

 

91.       IN MEMORY

Of Pelagon, a fisherman,

his father Meniscus placed

here a fishbasket and oar:

tokens of an unlucky life

           

86.       EXPERIENCE SHOWS US

            Wealth unchaperoned

by Virtue is never

an innocuous neighbor

 

Barnard quotes a commentator's observation:

The sense of her poems goes naturally with the meter and seems to fall into it, so that it looks like ordinary speech raised to the highest level of expressiveness.  In her great range of different meters there is not one which doers not move with perfect ease and receive her words as if they were ordained for it.

And responds: 

I should say, rather: as if she had invented it in that moment for that phrase alone.