Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation

A rectangular decorative headpiece features a central owl surrounded by foliage, flowers, and two small birds in flight.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.

A decorative drop-cap initial letter S is set within a square floral woodcut border.Sappho, the Greek poetess whom more than eighty generations have been obliged to hold without a peer, has never, in the entirety of her works, been brought within the reach of English readers. The key to her wondrous reputation—which would, perhaps, be still greater if it had ever been challenged—has hitherto lain hidden in other languages than ours. As a name, as a figure pre-eminent in literary history, she has indeed never been overlooked. But the English-reading world has come to think, and to be content with thinking, that no verse of hers survives save those two hymns which Addison, in the Spectator, has made famous—by his panegyric, not by Ambrose Philips’ translation.

My aim in the present work is to familiarize English readers, whether they understand Greek or not, with every word of Sappho, by translating