Sappho: Poems, translated from the ancient Greek and with an introduction by Willis Barnstone

Sun & Moon Press, 136 pages, $10.95 paper

To consider the poetry and reputation of Sappho, poet of seventh-century Lesbos, is to collide with the history of translation and the sexual politics of literature over the past two millennia. Nearly everything we know about her is a guess or a caprice, including her name (which may have been "Psappha") and the authorship of some of her better-known poetic fragments. Our predecessors had ample opportunity to study her complete work until the early Middle Ages, at which point it was all but destroyed for its supposed immorality. As a result, succeeding generations have been constrained to build Sappho according to their own liking on the basis of something like a hundred fragments, some no more than a single word long. Through novels, operas, poems, and paintings, but most of all through translations, we have received many images of Sappho: lovesick chanteuse, spinster schoolteacher, lyre-flicking priestess, Restoration good-time girl, lesbian separatist. And the truth can never be discovered.

So, too, with the parallel and never-ending stream of faithful translations, imitations, and fantasies, beginning in Latin with Catullus and Horace and continuing in our own language with Donne, Addison, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Millay. In 1958, Mary Barnard published the translation that has defined the nonclassicist's experience of Sappho in our time. What distinguished her work was her resistance to completing or filling out what time had stolen; she drew on the romantic poignancy of the fragment to make complete, modernist poems of the shards of verse. Her American Sappho had learned poetry from Arthur Waley, Ezra Pound, W.C. Williams, and, most of all, H.D., who was practically inhabited by her own version of Sappho in her early books.

Forty years later, Willis Barnstone has renewed and amplified Barnard's great work (which he acknowledges with gratitude). Barnstone's Greek is superior to Barnard's, and our language, too, has changed in that time. Though he is not always capable of his predecessor's delicacy or sense of humor, he captures the freshness of Sappho's approach as other intervening translators have not:

Some say cavalry and others claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black
earth.
I say it is

the one you love.

A revolutionary claim in ancient Greece, deftly reproduced in Barnstone's translation by the delay of the movement into a second stanza. His Sappho has learned something from Antonio Machado and Jorge Luis Borges and perhaps from García Lorca, all of whom Barnstone has translated; there is an almost Spanish lyricism in

Rubbing its wings incessantly,
a cicada pours flaming summer
over the earth
in luminous song.

Inevitably, Barnstone's Sappho is only a new and more comfortable invention -- in place of Barnard's near-neurasthenic imagist, we now have a smart, confident cosmopolite and professional writer. But Barnstone's translation is one of the best in English, and a loving gift to the memory and idea of that distant and unknowable poet of remote Lesbos.