The Mystery of Sappho and Her Erotic Legacy. Sappho's verse has been elevated to new heights in a gorgeous translation by the poet and classics scholar Anne Carson. By Dinitia Smith. [New York Times: Books]
Anne Carson wrote an extended piece on Eros: The Bittersweet, essentially a long meditation on Sappho’s use of glukupikron “sweet-bitter” as an adjective describing love.
I would dearly love to see Anne Carson’s interpretation of Sappho. The one I use is Paul Roche’s translation.
One of the longer Sappho fragments is the one found in “On the Sublime.”
It makes sense that the first experience of eros is sweet, followed by bitter. If eros is lack, then finding the complement to that lack is sweet. The bitterness comes about in the realization of the loss you never realized until that moment. No?
Since I have no Greek (yet), I can only compare translations to each other to come up with better English wordings. Sigh. My tongue it trips; and flame trips across my skin. Blinded I am by this.... In this poem of jealousy, this is eros of a sort; in setting up this threesome, Sappho shows that here is a matchless perfection she feels unable to enter. Perhaps this loss of words weighs heavily upon her. Perhaps she unconsciously feels the weight of the regard of several millenia admiring the words she eventually does come up with.
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