Book description
More or less 150 years after Homer's
Iliad
, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is
present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to
have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some
500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably
small and fragmented body of lyric poetry - among them poems of
invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance -
that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato
called the tenth Muse. This is a new translation of her surviving
poetry.
Sappho was born sometime between 630 and 617 BCE and died
around 570. Little of certainty is known about her life. A native of
the island of Lesbos, she resided in its largest city, Mytilene. She
composed songs for choral and solo performance on a wide range of
themes but is best known for amatory songs focusing on adolescent
females. She is renowned as the first woman poet in literary history,
and her songs have been universally admired throughout antiquity and modernity.
Aaron Poochigian was born in 1973. He earned his Phd
in Classics in 2006. He was a visiting professor of Classics at the
University of Utah in 2007-8 and is currently D. L. Jordon Fellow at
Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. His poems and translations have
appeared in a number of journals, including Chimaera,
Classical Journal and Unsplendid.
Carol Ann Duffy's poetry has received every major award in
Britain, including the Whitbread and the Forward prized for Mean
Time and the T. S. Eliot Award for Rapture. In the USA
she has received the E. M. Forster and Lannan Awards. Carol Ann has
also written extensively for children and has editied many anthologies.
