Alright so I left out a zero. So sue me.
I actually made a number of postings here on Sappho in April of two
thousand, including a translation, but the comments I was referring to were
as follows, which I'm reposting by request:
=========================
Sappho is in my experience the most untranslatable of poets.
Partly this is because of the uniqueness of her sound. Imagine the
brilliant aural technique of Keats combined with the passion of
Shelley, the naivete of Blake, and the clarity of Dryden. Now
imagine this expressed as colloquially and unselfconsciously as
something you might overhear someone saying on the phone. And put
it all in a thick old fashioned Essex dialect. That might give you
an idea of it.
But it's also because her poetry stubbornly resists explication
by any of our modern critical orthodoxies, according to any of which
her poetry must ultimately be seen as trivial. Which means of course
not that there is anything wrong with her poetry but that there is
something wrong with our theories.
The definitive discussion of Sappho's sexuality is still Denys
Page's Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford rev. ed. 1959), especially his
comments on Fr. 1 and his further remarks in Part I Section II
subsection 9. It's written for scholars but you can still get
the gist of it even if you can't translate the Greek he quotes. I
believe it's still in print in paperback. It also includes accurate
literal English translations of the more important fragments.
I've been to Lesbos. It is a beautiful island -- the modern
Greek novelist Strates Myriveles called it "the most erotic
landscape in the world." The only memorial to Sappho is a rather
kitschy statue of her on the parlia. The fine beach at Erissos,
which some say was Sappho's home, has become a place of pilgrimage
for gay women tourists from Western Europe and America. The locals,
who tend to be quite socially conservative, take their presence in
stride, since in their view one tourist's money is after all much
like another's.
====
There ain't no sanity clause.
-- Chico Marx
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