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.
