Sappho: A Garland

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

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