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]

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.