79. Carson’s Sappho

In her translation of Sappho’s surviving words, Carson has rendered the silences along with what remains. Using lineation and square brackets to indicate the ragged edges of damaged papyrus and open space to imply the setting from which individual lines were plucked, Carson places the poems in an aesthetic of loss, opening their absences, rather than framing them.

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The beauty, the achievement of Carson’s translation, is this aesthetic of loss, her embrace of the very little we actually have, allowing it to be all. With a modernist poetic sensibility, she enlists the very brokenness of Sappho’s lines to intensify their emotional import, their longing, their dilations of desire. Carson’s Sappho seems to pant, rather than sing, her syntax fragmenting even where a sentence would be as accurate.

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin

In her visualization, as in her language, Carson is faithful to how Sappho exists now, a lost poet, an aura around fragments. This Sappho is not the one who lived, but the one we have left. / Glenn Kurtz, Southwest Review

Sappho/ Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (English and Greek Edition) Vintage Books 2002

„There’s not much poetry in this one, yet the whole thing is poetry…“
Anne Carson’s Nox reviewed by Ben Ratliff. (The New York Times)