Here is her version of Fragment 31:įor when I look at you, even a moment, no speakingīut all is to be dared, because even a person of povertyĬarson is also aware that repetition matters. Carson tries to translate nothing which is not in the Greek, and to follow the original word order and line breaks as far as possible. The four words of Carson's poem are a haunting translation of a single word in Greek: leptophon.Ĭarson provides brief but useful notes which should enable even the Greekless reader to understand some of the most important textual problems in Sappho. Carson loves the spaces almost as much as the words: she says in her introduction that 'brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.' Here, for instance, is Fragment 24D: Anne Carson's new translations, with facing Greek text, make effective use of blank space and brackets to convey the feeling of a torn or burned scrap of papyrus. Reconstructing Sappho from what remains is like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw.īoth scholars and creative writers have made much of Sappho's fragmentariness.

But even with these additions, we have only about 3% of what she wrote. Then, around the turn of the 20th century, some scraps of papyrus from an ancient rubbish tip at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt turned out to contain fragments of poetry - including substantial chunks of Sophocles, Euripides and Sappho. Until the end of the 19th century, these two poems were practically all that was known from the work of the poet Plato called 'the tenth Muse'.

If not winter fragments of sappho