Preface
Chronology
A Note on the Text and Translation
Introduction
Poems and Fragments
GODDESSES
DESIRE AND DEATH-LONGING
HER GIRLS AND FAMILY
TROY
MAIDENS AND MARRIAGES
THE WISDOM OF SAPPHO
Appendix: Two New Poems
Further Reading
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PENGUIN 
CLASSICS
SAPPHO was born after 630 BCE and died around 570. A native of the island of Lesbos, she resided in its largest city, Mytilene. Though a poet of considerable range, she is best known for amatory poems focusing on adolescent females. After her death she became a figure of legend and, in the Hellenistic period (323–146 BCE), was canonized as one of the nine lyric poets worthy of study. Though little of her poetry survived the Middle Ages, archaeological excavation has recovered numerous fragments. She is renowned as the first woman poet in literary history.
AARON POOCHIGIAN attended Moorhead State University in Moorhead, Minnesota, 1991–6, where he studied under the poets Dave Mason, Alan Sullivan and Tim Murphy. He entered graduate school for Classics in 1997 at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. After travelling and doing research in Greece on fellowship, 2003–4, he earned his PhD in 2006. His original poems have appeared in such journals as Arion, Dark Horse and Poetry Magazine.
CAROL ANN DUFFY is a British poet, playwright and freelance writer. Her poetry has received every major award in Britain, including the Whitbread and Forward Prizes for Mean Time and the T. S. Eliot Award for Rapture. In the USA she has received the E. M. Forster and Lannan Awards. Carol Ann has also written extensively for children and has edited many anthologies. She is the Poet Laureate.
She was born after 630 BC on the Greek island of Lesbos. Plato honoured her as the Tenth Muse, and she was to inspire the naming of both a sexuality and a poetics. The Ancient Greeks celebrated her as their finest poet and reproduced her image on their coins and vases, and poets from antiquity to the present day have recognized her supreme lyric gift. The Roman poets Catullus and Horace, who probably read her work in its entirety, emulated and were influenced by her. Horace declared in his Odes that her poems merited sacred admiration. The list of poets who have translated her, written versions of her poems or written poems about her, is endless, but includes Ovid, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Alexander Pope, Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Edna St Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound and many poets writing in our own twenty-first century, notably the distinguished Canadian writer Anne Carson. Sappho’s poems survive in fragments, some found as scrunched ingredients in papier mâché coffins, and in a handful of more complete lyrics; but ninety per cent of what she wrote is lost to us now. She would have sung her poems, accompanying herself on the lyre, and she may well have invented the pēctis, a variation of the instrument. It is from this ancient verse, sung to the lyre, that lyric poetry evolved. As one of a ‘new wave’ of Greek poets, she was one of the first poets to write out of the personal, moving away from the narrative of the gods to the direct and human story of the individual and in doing so she transformed the lyric line. In these wonderful new translations by Aaron Poochigian we hear the voice of a great and enduring poet in our ear again. Sappho.
Because once on a time you were
Young, sing of what is taking place,
Talk to us for a spell, confer
Your special grace.
Sappho’s style was melodic, intimate, sensual, and she wrote lyrics of love and desire, of loss and longing. As Poochigian notes in his superb and meticulous introduction, there is always something truly youthful about Sappho’s spirit. She was a great celebrator, had a poet’s and a woman’s eye for the ‘gorgeous’; for flowers – chervil, rose, marigold and sweet clover; for smells – frankincense, aniseed, myrrh and honey; she loved the moon and ‘The glitter and glamour of the sun’; she loved, as her epithalamia, or marriage songs and other poems, show us, a good party, a ‘gleaming feast’. What is extraordinary, in reading these startlingly fresh, new versions, is how much life is conveyed by so little. Presented with only a tenth of what she wrote, we are vividly and deeply immersed in Sappho’s world – we walk with her on her island where ‘the breeze feels as gentle as honey’ or where she sees an apple tree or hears a nightingale singing the note of desire. And this is achieved through a confident and shining poetic simplicity which has endured for over two thousand years.
The greatest poets are able, long after their deaths, to speak to our humanity and it is in her love poems that Sappho does this most clearly. These poems are earned out of her openness to desire, her willingness to love, her acceptance of a lover’s suffering. In this, too, her spirit is forever young. Her love poems are why she endures and where we recognize ourselves: infatuated and jealous; smitten and fulfilled; brain and tongue shattered by love; wanting to die; remembering past encounters, ‘all beautiful’. Aaron Poochigian’s translations retain Sappho’s intense sense of being singingly alive and of being on the side of youth, and loveliness, and love. They will find many new readers for the major woman writer of antiquity.
Carol Ann Duffy
Dates are birth–death for people.
after 630–c. 570 BCE Sappho.
c. 620–early to mid 500s BCE Alcaeus, a poet from Lesbos contemporary with Sappho, who may have composed the opening lines of ‘I want to tell you something but good taste’.
384–322 BCE Aristotle, student of Plato and philosopher, whose Rhetoric preserves ‘I want to tell you something but good taste’.
342–291 BCE Menander, writer of New Comedy, whose Leucadia recounts Sappho’s legendary leap from the ‘Shining Rock’ (Leucas Petra).
c. 257–180 BCE Aristophanes of Byzantium, head librarian at the great library in Alexandria, who co-edits the nine-book collection of Sappho’s poems with Aristarchus of Samothrace (c. 220-c. 143 BCE).
84–54 BCE Catullus, Roman poet, who adapts several of Sappho’s poems, including ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’.
65–27 BCE Horace, Roman poet, who composes many of his Odes in the Sapphic stanza and describes Sappho’s utterances as ‘worthy of sacred awe’ (Ode 2.13).
60–after 7 BCE Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Greek historian and rhetorician, whose On Literary Composition preserves Sappho’s ‘Subtly bedizened Aphrodite’.
43 BCE–17 CE Ovid, Roman poet, who popularizes the legend of Sappho’s suicide in a literary epistle written in her voice (Heroides 15).
first century CE Longinus, Greek rhetorician and critic, whose On the Sublime preserves ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’.
125–185 CE Maximus of Tyre, Greek rhetorician and philosopher, whose Orations preserve, among other fragments, ‘Here is the reason: it is wrong’ and ‘Like a gale smiting an oak’.
130–169 CE Hephaestion of Alexandria, Greek metrist, whose Handbook on Metre (an epitome of a longer work in 48 books) preserves numerous fragments of Sappho’s poems, including ‘A full moon shone’ and ‘Kytherea, precious’.
end of second–beginning of third century CE Athenaeus, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, whose lengthy Scholars at Dinner preserves numerous fragments, including ‘The ambrosial mixture’ and ‘Once as a too, too lissome’.
331–363 CE Julian the Apostate, last polytheistic emperor of Rome, who cites Sappho’s ‘You were at hand’ in a literary epistle addressed to the deceased Iamblicus (245–325 CE), a Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher.
end of tenth century CE The compilation of the Suda, a massive Byzantine encyclopedia containing a biographical entry on Sappho.
1110–80 CE John Tzetzes of Constantinople, Byzantine poet and grammarian, who laments that ‘time has frittered away Sappho and her works, her lyre and songs’ (On the Metres of Pindar 20–22).