sappho if not winter fragments of sappho vintage tr carson

Her lyrics were meant to be performed, whether solo or chorally. In addition to matters of grooming and adornment, she instructed them in music and dance. Sappho seems to have been entrusted with the care of maidens between puberty and marriage. While the nineteenth-century suggestion that Sappho ran a boarding school was too much of its time, the reality might not have been far off. The introduction provides historical context and the various interpretations drawn from the little known of Sappho’s life. I found the editorial matter, both introduction and commentary, helpful. The poems and fragments themselves are printed with commentary on each facing page. About one-third of the 150 or so pages in this volume are preface (by Carol Ann Duffy) and introduction by the translator, Aaron Poochigian. This book presents, in English translation, what we have. It remains a fraction of what she created, perhaps ten percent. More recently, this has been supplemented by papyrus finds (sometimes used as mummy wrapping). For centuries, the little of her preserved writing was in quotations in surviving books by others. But, unfortunately, those have been lost like the rest of the Great Library. So high was the esteem she was held in that two librarians in Alexandria commissioned a collection of her works, which filled nine volumes. As Homer was remembered as the paragon of the epic, she was of the lyric-texts meant to be sung accompanied by the lyre (she also seems to have invented one model of that instrument). S.Sappho of Lesbos: Both her name and that of her native island have long designated homoerotic love between women. Most of Sappho’s poetry has been lost, but her reputation has endured through surviving fragments, many of them fleshed out by other poets who sought to “fill in the blanks.” (Of the 189 known fragments of her work, twenty contain just one readable word, thirteen have only two, and nearly half have ten or fewer.) Major poets like Ben Jonson, T. It is because of the homoerotic nature of some of Sappho’s poems that “lesbian” and “sapphic” have their current sexual denotations and connotations. “She is a mortal marvel,” wrote Antipater of Sidon, before proceeding to catalog the Seven Wonders of the World. Cicero mentioned that a statue of her stood in the town hall of Syracuse, so she was famous in her own day, or not long thereafter. According to the Parian Marble, Sappho was exiled to Sicily sometime between 604 and 594. Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos around 620 BC. One of the best and most famous lyric poets of antiquity was a woman, Sappho. Anne Carson If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2002) For when I look at you, even a moment, no speakingīut all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty

Sappho if not winter fragments of sappho vintage tr carson