Customer Reviews

Sappho: A Garland : The Poems and Fragments of Sappho

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Of the several translations of Sappho's work into English during the past two decades, Powell's ranks highest in three regards:

His translations bring the immediacy and nuance of Sappho more clearly to the fore.

While not encumbering the text, there is more scholarly supporting material (written so as to be accessible to the lay person as well as useful to the scholar) available in this volume than in any other.

Finally, while the poems that have reached us nearly in-tact are presented in most volumes of Sappho, Powell's book makes available many smaller fragments that have been lost to English-speakers for years in anything but the most inaccessible volumes.

-Nathan

Powell's translations of Sappho's poems and fragments of poems is well done. Beside the 30 pages of poems he includes much biographical material on her life; a glossary of terms, places, people;and her contribution to the field of poetry with an analysis of her meter.

The full poems are magnificent and the fragments are almost like a projective psychological exam, mysterious and evocative. Of course there is the poem here "Raise high the roofbeam, carpenters" on which J. D. Salinger named his famous novella.

Also included is the wonderful "Some say" poem in which she says that some will say an army or navy is beautiful but she says beauty resides in that which we love. Scholars have pointed out that Sappho's poetry explores the action of gods upon our emotions and compulsions, the nature of love in its many forms, and hymns of fertility and matrimony. This is in contradiction to the rise of the Greek city states and their masculine Imperialistic power reference.

There were also included my favorite four Sappho poems:

The moon has set
and the Pleiades; it is the middle
of the night and the hours go by
and I lie here alone.

Also the wonderful brief but penetrating poem about loss of the lover and loss of love:

For me
neither the honey
nor the bee.

I have always loved the poem about attaining the utmost apple;

As a sweet apple reddens
on a high branch

at the tip of the topmost bough;
The apple-pickers missed it.

No, the didn't miss it;
They could not reach it.

The poems begin with the magnificent "Artfully adorned Aphrodite" full of wit, sarcasm and humor about the repetitive nature of love and obsession, loss and grief, recovery and new obsessions.

Sappho is so frequently identified as Lesbian yet the poems are full of eroticism around both beautiful young men and women. Granted the verses about women are more sexually intimate and the verses around young men are celebratory of the handsome and virile young male, marriage and fertility.

I have read the poems repeatedly over the last 10 years, always finding that they evoke new images from my unconscious with each new reading. Let me end with one of these fragments for which the full poem is lost:

Golden chickpeas grow along the shore.

Much of Sappho's original poetry seems to have been lost; classic writers refer to many of her works that are no longer extant. The few works that survive are in fragmentary condition, often just a few words from the middle of a line.

As short as this book is (65 pages), the translation is only half. End matter starts with a brief, helpful biographical note. The rest is a detailed analysis of poetic form - possibly of interest to the specialist, but a specialist I haven't met.

The translation is quite clear about the points at which text is missing, and makes no attempt to interpolate. Instead of whole poems, we see individual lines or fragments that evoke Sappho's tone. Since I knew Sappho only by reputation, I wasn't ready for its romantic appeal, or for its praise of male loves ("In my eyes, he matches the gods...") as well as female. I should have known better - every classic I've read has been very different than its reputation. I strongly recommend this to any well-rounded reader.

//wiredweird

Having read several translations of Sappho's poetry, Powell's version falls short. Much of the original poetry has been destroyed or is in very poor condition, leaving us with only fragments. In _Sappho: a Garland_ the fragments are run together with a gap or space indicating where one fragment ends and another begins. This leads one to believe that Sappho's work was one long, continuous poem that has been destoryed in places, while others remain in tact. This is not the case, and is one reason why I am not a fan of this collection.

I also didn't care for the translation itself when compared to the works of others. To be fair, I do not read Greek, my impression is soley based on my sense of the poetry here compared with others. With this in mind, Powell seems to be more technically focused on the work rather than on capturing the "spirit" of each poem - the essence or emotion Sappho was attempting to communicate to her audience and the true measure of a poem in my opinion. The result is a somewhat mechanical feel to the work that simply doesn't do Sappho the justice she deserves.

On its own, Powell's translation has its merits, and I did enjoy his discussion of what is known of Sappho and his afterwords on the translation itself. To be honest I much preferred (and would recommend) Anne Carson's collection over this.