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

Those who wish to learn more about Sappho than is here recorded will find a guide in the Bibliography which I have added at the end of the volume. My sole desire in these pages is to present “the great poetess” to English readers in a form from which they can judge of her excellence for themselves, so far as that is possible for those to whom Aeolic Greek The dialect of Ancient Greek spoken on Lesbos, Sappho’s home is unfamiliar. Her more important fragments have been translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as English; but all previous complete editions of her works have been written solely by scholars for scholars. Now that, through the appreciation of Sappho by modern poets and painters, her name is becoming day by day more familiar, it seems time to show her as we know her to have been, to those who have neither leisure nor power to read her in the tongue in which she wrote.

I have not concerned myself much with textual criticism, for I do not arrogate any power of discernment greater than that possessed by a scholar like Bergk. Only those who realize what he has done to determine the text of Sappho can quite appreciate the value of his work. Where he is satisfied, I am content. He wrote for the learned few, and I only strive to popularize the result of such researches as his: to show, indeed, so far as I can, that