Sappho: A New Translation

Sappho: A New Translation is a 1958 book by Mary Barnard with a foreword by Dudley Fitts.  Inspired by Salvatore Quasimodo's Lirici Greci and encouraged by Ezra Pound, with whom Barnard had corresponded since 1933, she translated 100 poems of the archaic Greek poet Sappho into English free verse.  Her translation was both commercially and critically successful.

Background

Mary Barnard studied Greek while a student at Reed College, and in 1930 was given a copy of Henry Thornton Wharton's translation of Sappho.  This inspired her to adapt fragments of Sappho, such as in "Love Poem", a four-line adaptation of the Ode to Aphrodite.  In 1933, Barnard began a correspondence with the poet Ezra Pound, sending him six of her poems.  In 1950 she was bedridden for six months after contracting hepatitis B; during this time she returned to studying Greek, and was sent a copy of Salvatore Quasimodo's Italian-language anthology Lirici Greci.  Inspired by this, and encouraged by Pound, to whom she sent early drafts, Barnard began to produce her own translations of Sappho.  She spent about two years working on her translation, completing it in 1953; it was published in 1958.

Translation

Sappho: A New Translation was published by the University of California Press.  It comprises a foreword by Dudley Fitts, one hundred poems in translation, a note on the translation by Barnard, a list of sources for the poems, with their corresponding number in John Maxwell Edmonds' Loeb Classical Library edition, a bibliography and index.  Barnard's translation is based on the Greek text of Edmonds' Loeb edition. She groups the poems into six sections, which she arranges to give a narrative of Sappho's life from youth to old age.  

Barnard's translations render Sappho's poetry in modern language, in contrast to the old-fashioned diction preferred by previous translators.  Where the surviving Greek text is too fragmentary to fully translate, she gives a conjectured reconstruction, for instance in the fourth and fifth stanzas of Sappho 16.  The poems are given titles, and translated in free verse.  She does not always retain the stanzaic structure of Sappho's poems: she often uses tercets where Sappho's poems are in Sapphic stanzas, while for Sappho 130 she divides a couplet quoted by Hephaestion over six lines and three stanzas.

Reception

Barnard's translation of Sappho was both commercially and critically successful. Though initially she had difficulty finding a publisher – Anchor Books rejected the manuscript, saying that "Sappho would never sell" – the translation had sold 100,000 copies by 1994 and  had been continuously in print with the University of California Press for 55 years.

Early reviewers criticized Barnard for choosing to translate into free verse.  Vivian Mercier, reviewing for Poetry, and W. B. Stanford in Hermathena, both complained that Barnard had not used more structured meters, while the reviewer in The Classical Outlook suggested that the translations would have been more memorable had they been in rhyming verse.  Barnard's choice to translate Sappho into free verse rather than attempting a metrical imitation has been followed by many subsequent translators.

In his review of Sappho, Burton Raffel described Barnard's work as "as nearly perfect an English translation as one can find, a great translation, an immensely moving translation, complete, beautiful, deserving of endless praise".  In a 1994 review, Lorrie Goldensohn said that it was still one of the best English translations of Sappho. Barnard's translation is particularly influential in the US, where according to Josephine Balmer it is "iconic".

References

Works cited

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

1958 poetry books
Sappho
Translations into English