Tent Posts

These translations of Sappho are for me the most beautiful I've ever encountered... Lombardo presents each fragment on its own page, and presents them Thematically (in other words, not in order). He has used ALL of the long and shorter fragments. In the Introduction he says that he did not want to use every single fragment because some of them are only one word and thus incomprehensible for poetic purposes (which I also agree)...so in total he presents over 90 of the fragments in the most beautiful and ravishing renditions I've ever seen! These may be Lombardo's most beautiful translations he's done for Hackett Publishing!

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 is Turkey today.. (She went in exile for a short period due to political upheavel). Sappho was already famous in Antiquity. Plato called her the tenth Muze and someone said her poetry was "as refreshing as a morning breeze". Some of the best poems of Sappho are those that describe her loneliness. (#62) "But if you are my friend, Go to a younger woman's bed, For I will not endure an affair In which I am older than the man." (#73) "The moon has set, And the Pleiades Midnight The hour has gone by I sleep alone."