Poetry: 105a: Sappho

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

105a from If Not, Winter by Sappho, translation Anne Carson.

As the sweetapple reddens on a high branch
high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot--
no, not forgot: were unable to reach

Comments

[ancientreader]

Irony: The poetic fragment precisely articulates the reader's, anyway this reader's, feeling about the fragment itself. "Were unable to reach," indeed: What would we give to have more of Sappho?

So you got hold of Anne Carson's translation, then? How do you like it? (My feelings won't be hurt if you don't!)

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Yes, it would have been nice to have more than fragments. In fact, I had to get to 105 before I found something that was substantive enough ('she with violets in her hair' is nice but not enough, I think, for posting) and something I really liked but I appreciate the challenge of the translation. I will go through the rest of it, looking for more.

Yes, I think I like it. There just isn't, as you say, much of it.

[ancientreader]

About there not being much of it: OH GOD maddening. I wound up reading the fragments more or less as one long discontinuous poem so it accumulated a kind of cohesion from fragment to fragment. But I think the cohesion might have arisen from Carson's sensibility as a translator as much as from anything else. Probably unknowable unless one's a scholar of classical Greek, but I'll happily wallow in my ignorance.