Customer Reviews

The Complete Poems of Sappho

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The title of my review is a fragment of a famous poem by Sappho. I challenge you to find that poem. If you do let me know.

Do I have to introduce Sappho? From Antiquity till now she's a shining star. According to Plato she was the tenth muse and someone called her poetry "as refreshing as a morning breeze".
Is Sappho a lesbian? By many readers Sappho is regarded as such. I'm not saying that this isn't true but to answer that question we should know her better because too little is left of her work to say anything with certainty.

In Antiquity decent women were supposed to work in the kitchen and to raise their children, nothing more. But there were exceptions.
More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what's modern Turkey. Her poems are vivid and she needs only a few words to describe essential human feelings. For instance she calls solitude: "this icy numbness of being alone".

Sappho excels also in describing nature - something you won't find often in Ancient literature.
" Wedding of Andromache " is one of the most vivid descriptions in the poetry of Antiquity. It gives an almost journalistic account of the homecoming of Hector and Andromache.

( Nice to know: from Sappho's poems remain about 500 lines. All Tragedies by Aeschylus have a total of 8144 lines. Conclusion: What's left of Sappho's poems is almost next to nothing.)

Barnstone gives a translation in modern and easy to read English. It renders the delicacy and tenderness of Sappho's poems.

This translation is the worst translation of Sappho's poems I have ever read. Almost all the poems in this book sound like bland, unemotional, and unimaginative prose. It's so bland that I wouldn't even call it expressive. And this is not because Sappho is bland. No, this is because this translation is as bland as bland can possibly be. Trust me on this one: Do not buy this book. It would be better to read her fragmented poems with a different translator than to even get a glimpse of what I just witnessed.