![\"Image](\"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/files\/2026\/10\/sappho.png\")
<\/a>One of my cherished books is a copy of Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho<\/a>. (I got this one year for my birthday – thanks again Emily!) This is a beautiful translation of Sappho and Carson’s practice as a poet is in clear evidence on every page. It is the most honest translation you will find in any language. It is a beautifully printed too: there is the Greek text (in fragments) on one page in red font and the translation on the facing page in black. Most translators like to fill in the text – they take a handful of fragments and string them together into what they think the poem meant. This is like trying to reassemble the true text from a Burroughs cut-up or some Dadaist experiment. In the typical Sappho translation, one finds a dialogue, not between the translator and the text, but the translator’s response to all the previous translations, many of which I have appreciated. There is some great poetry in many of these translations, but are they Sappho? Carson gives us the words in Greek and a sea of brackets where text is missing. I find this exciting because it reproduces the experience of looking at an actual papyrus. By sharing the text, Carson, the poet, also invites us to discover our own meanings. Even if you don’t have a Classical Greek dictionary handy, the fragments of translation asks the reader to piece together meaning from those handfuls of puzzle pieces. Some pages are a single word, a single sentence, and some are whole verses. Carson writes in her introduction “…at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write – but they cannot be called texts of Sappho’s…” That explains every translation of Sappho and is a clear invitation to create on our own.<\/p>\nSomewhat non-tangentially (which is my non-Nobel Prize winning writing style), there was an interesting attempt to date a poem by Sappho by her description of the night sky<\/a> at midnight – a fun read!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was thrilled to see that Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature today. To be honest, I know her mostly from the pages of the New York Review of Books over the years. Her essays are polymathic explorations … Continue reading