Poems of Sappho

By Sappho

Book Overview

Plato hailed her as "the Tenth Muse," and 2,500 years later her voice remains dazzling as well as direct and honest. Sappho, a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, wrote verse that sings to both sexes of desire, rapture, and sorrow. Praised for their simplicity and sincerity, her poems nevertheless evoke powerful and memorable images as well as a sense of unreserved eroticism. Her focus on emotion and individualism sets her work apart from that of her contemporaries, lending it an intimacy that foreshadows modern poetry.
Details about Sappho's life are largely unknown; she is thought to have lived sometime between 612-570 B.C.E., and her poetry was read and admired throughout the ancient world. Today her poems survive in fragmentary form, and she is best known as a symbol of female homosexuality, having inspired the terms "sapphic" and "lesbian." This concise collection of her surviving works features an informative Introduction by translator J. M. Edmonds.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 048681727X
• ISBN13: 9780486817279
• Release Date: February 2018
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Shining and Resplendent Sappho...

These translations of Sappho are for me the most beautiful I've ever encountered... Lombardo presents each fragment on its own page, and presents them Thematically (in other words, not in order). He has used ALL of the long and shorter fragments. In the Introduction he says that he did not want to use every single fragment because some of them are only one word and thus incomprehensible for poetic purposes (which I also agree)...so in total he presents over 90 of the fragments in the most beautiful and ravishing renditions I've ever seen! These may be Lombardo's most beautiful translations he's done for Hackett Publishing!

"The moon has set..."

In Antiquity decent women were supposed to work in the kitchen and to raise their children, nothing more, but there were exceptions. More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is Turkey today.. (She went in exile for a short period due to political upheavel). Sappho was already famous in Antiquity. Plato called her the tenth Muze and someone said her poetry was "as refreshing as a morning breeze". Some of the best poems of Sappho are those that describe her loneliness. (#62) "But if you are my friend, Go to a younger woman's bed, For I will not endure an affair In which I am older than the man." (#73) "The moon has set, And the Pleiades Midnight The hour has gone by I sleep alone."