Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Poems & Fragments: new expanded edition
    Unavailable
    Poems & Fragments: new expanded edition
    Unavailable
    Poems & Fragments: new expanded edition
    Ebook243 pages1 hour

    Poems & Fragments: new expanded edition

    By Sappho

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    This second, expanded edition of Josephine Balmer’s classic translation of the Greek poet Sappho has new, recently-discovered fragments, including the Brothers Poem, the Kypris Song and the Cologne Fragment. In a new essay on these additions she discusses the issues raised in the translating – and in some cases retranslating – of these fragmentary and ever-shifting texts. Poems & Fragments is now the only complete, readily-available translation in English of Sappho’s surviving work.

    Sappho was one of the greatest poets in classical literature. Her lyric poetry is among the finest ever written, and although little of her work has survived and little is known about her, she is regarded not just as one of the greatest women poets, but often as the greatest woman poet in world literature.

    She lived on the island of Lesbos around 600 BC, and even in her lifetime, her work was widely known and admired in the Greek world. Plato called her 'the tenth muse', and she was a major influence on other poets, from Horace and Catullus to more recent lyric poets. Yet in later centuries, speculation about her sexuality has tended to diminish her poetic reputation. One medieval pope considered her so subversive that her poems were burned.

    Some of her poems were written for the women she loved, but her circle of women friends and admirers was not unlike Socrates' circle of followers. She may have been a lesbian in the modern sense, or she may not, but to call her a lesbian poet is an over-simplification. What remains is her poetry, or the fragments which have survived of it, and her intense, sensuous, highly accomplished love poems are among the finest in any language.

    First published in 1984 and revised in 1992, Josephine Balmer's edition brings together all the extant poems and fragments of Sappho. In a comprehensive introduction, she discusses Sappho's poetry, its historical background and critical reputation, as well as aspects of contemporary Greek society, sexuality and women.

    'Balmer's translations are the best I have read to date. She gives me the trace of a spirited, deed-minded, direct, guileless soul, and she modestly fulfils Boris Pasternak's demand that “ideally translation too will be a work of art; sharing a common text, it will stand alongside the original, unrepeatable in its own right” ' - Christopher Logue, Literary Review

    'If Josephine Balmer's new translations can bring Sappho's sensuous clarity, her genius, back into prominence, they will perform an invaluable service not only to us, but to poetry.' - Harriett Gilbert, Sunday Times

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateAug 8, 2018
    ISBN9781780374581
    Unavailable
    Poems & Fragments: new expanded edition
    Author

    Sappho

    Mary Barnard (1909–2001) was a prominent American poet, translator, and biographer with many books in her repertoire. She studied Greek at Reed College and began to translate at Ezra Pound's suggestion in the 1930s. Her Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir was published by the University of California Press in 1984. Two years later she received the Western States Book Award for her book-length poem, Time and the White Tigress. She also published prose fiction and a volume of essays on mythology as well as the original lyrics gathered in Collected Poems.  

    Read more from Sappho

    Related authors

    Related to Poems & Fragments

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How Instagram Saved Poetry

      Oct 15, 2018

      How Instagram Saved Poetry
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Trojan War Museum

      Jul 29, 2019

      The Trojan War Museum
      15 min read

    • Article

      All The Gay Saints

      May 1, 2020

      All The Gay Saints
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Poet’s Craft

      Jan 1, 2020

      To begin with a definition: A poem is a text structurally constrained by the repetition of any language element(s). The continuum of poetic constraint is extensive, stretching from operations that a reader will find completely imperceptible to overwh

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Tenth Muse

      Mar 1, 2021

      The Tenth Muse
      9 min read

    • Article

      Beyond the Alps

      Apr 10, 2017

      Beyond the Alps
      3 min read

    • Article

      Was Shakespeare a Woman?

      May 10, 2019

      Was Shakespeare a Woman?
      18 min read

    • Article

      A History And Theory Of The Line In English Language Poetry

      Jul 1, 2022

      For me, and for generations of US readers before me, poetry has been defined by the appearance of the line break on the page, that ragged righthand margin signaling that something is at work in the arrangement of the words on paper beyond mere transc

      59 min read

    • Article

      Creative Fragments

      Aug 21, 2022

      This year’s UK Booker Prize has three debut novelists on the longlist of 13. After Sappho must rank as the most experimental. The book charts the lives of a group of feminists, sapphists, artists, writers and actors through the late 1800s to the 1920

      2 min read

    • Article

      Taking Poetry Personally

      Nov 1, 2021

      To consider how absorption into a poem’s world works, immerse yourself in two opening stanzas. The first comes from John Crowe Ransom’s most anthologized poem, the elegy “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” first published in 1924: There was such s

      12 min read

    • Article

      On Memory and Literature

      Jun 30, 2021

      Now we're all possessors of personal supercomputers that can instantly connect us to whole libraries — there can seem little sense to make iambs and trochees part of one's soul. The post On Memory and Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      18 min read

    • Article

      The Literary Lives of Mid-Century Nuns

      May 8, 2023

      It's time we understand why the nuns of this era were drawn to writing and publishing poetry. The post The Literary Lives of Mid-Century Nuns appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Glimmers Of Hope: A 2021 Poetry Preview, Part 1

      Jan 11, 2021

      This year, critic Craig Morgan Teicher says American poetry has become too big for just one person to cover, so he's invited five colleagues to bring their own perspectives to our 2021 poetry preview.

      6 min read

    Reviews for Poems & Fragments

    4/5

    95 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Lombardo does it again. Unbelievably beautiful and resonant, miles and centuries away.
    • 2/5
      Verzameling van fragmenten en gedichten, met korte uitleiding.Vertaling Aart R.P. Wildeboer op basis van werk van Pierre J. Suasso de Lima de PradoVeel korte , soms onbegrijpelijke stukjes
    • 5/5
      Sappho is a great poet, and I enjoyed this book a lot. As translated by Jim Powell, Sappho is a poet who speaks directly to modern sensibilities, which many other poets of the ancient world, however great their achievement, do not.There is nothing a translator can do about the fact that so many of her poems are missing or incomplete, except make the best job of presenting what remains - and in both his translations and the notes that accompany them, Jim Powell does just this.
    • 5/5
      I love Stanley Lombardo's work, translating and commenting on Sappho. Sappho's existing body of work is pitifully small, but I felt such a resonance within me when I read these poems and fragments: Lombardo does a great job of letting us see the person within the poet, and it doesn't take a large number of poems to achieve this. What is lacking in quantity is made up by quality of language. Some poems from a man's view, some from a woman's. The emotions and feelings exposed in these poems are universal, I believe. Lombardo does his best to make Sappho approachable and real to a modern reader. I love this edition of her poetry.