Sappho
(A translation)
by William Carlos Williams

I am 72 years old. I've gone on living as I could as a doctor and writing poetry on the side. I practised to get money to live as I please, and what pleases me is to write poetry.

I don't speak English, but the American idiom. I don't know how to write anything else, and I refuse to learn. I'm writing and planning something all the time. I have nothing to do- a retired doctor who can't use his right hand anymore. But my coco (my head, you know) goes on spinning and maybe occasionally I work it pretty hard. It goes on day and night. All my life I've never stopped thinking. I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

I have worked with two or three friends in making the translation for I am no Greek scholar but have been veritably shocked by the official British translations of a marvellous poem by one of the greatest poets of all time. How their ears can have sanctioned the enormities that they produced is more than I can understand. American scholars must have been scared off by the difficulties of the job not to have done better. Their prosy versions were little better - to my taste. It may be that I also have failed but all I can say is that as far as I have been able to do I have been as accurate as the meaning of the words permitted - always with a sense of our own American idion to instruct me.

© Poems in Folio, 1957