The original Greek text is included in an appendix. What emerges in this careful and engaging study is an explication of Sappho's work and its literary environment, which illuminates both Sappho and the ways she has been read, adopted, and co-opted over the centuries. Without polemics, and with scrupulous candor and fidelity to the originals, Snyder allows even those readers who are, as she puts it, 'Greekless' to find their connection with the vitality of the words and the poems, which often exist on the page in only the most fragmentary form. She elucidates Sappho's representation of female desire and her influence on modern American women poets. Unlike most of the great Latin poets, however, Sappho has not been well served by translators.
Most previous translations are either over-romantic, or dull.
In this translation I have tried to reproduce Sappho's music as closely as English allows, thus conveying the full depth and subtlety of her meaning. She was an aristocrat who married a prosperous merchant, and she had a daughter named Cleis. Her wealth afforded her with the opportunity to live her life as she chose, and she chose to spend it studying the arts on the isle of Lesbos. In the seventh century BC, Lesbos was a cultural center. Sappho spent most her time on the island, though she also traveled widely throughout Greece.