Tragic power of the word

The fragments of Sappho constitute a compelling demonstration of the tragic power of the word, its capacity to make us feel loss as deeply as we do in life. The lines just quoted are all that survive of the original poem, recovered from a paraphrase by an obscure orator named Maximus of Tyre. We will never know what happened after Eros shook the poet’s mind, or who caused the tempest. The sensitive reader, confronted with fragment 47, must attempt something like an imaginative reconstruction of the whole poem, as it might have been. Despite the impossibility of the undertaking, the longer the lines play in the mind, the closer the lost poem comes glimmering toward the surface.

There have been many fine translations of the fragments of Sappho since Philips‘ day, and now Anne Carson, a distinguished Canadian poet, offers her version. Carson restores to us the Sappho who fell in love with a girl because she reminded her of a graceless child and strips away the mawkish cliche of the odd musical lady leaping off the cliff (admittedly less of a problem now than when classical literature was widely read).

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translations from the Greek by Anne Carson, reviewed by Jamie James. / Los Angeles Times, 25.8.02