Title: Sappho Author: Mary Barnard (trans.) Publisher: University of California Press Publish Date: 1986 Pages: 114 Genres:: Poetry, Bisexual Reviewer: Chris R. Morgan

Rating:

It was a compulsion of mine as a youngster that if I'm not allowed to know about or consume something, I'm all the more curious about said thing. This is surely common among many young’uns. But while most people pounded in the sugar or poked a dead body with a stick, I had an attraction to books that, while having stuffiness similar to that of the standard classic being thrown at me at school, contained high volumes of genitalia. This wasn't simply pre-adolescent perversion; you'll find just as much enlightenment as you do amusement by reading the sexual literature of the past. 

Sappho might not strike a chord with the typical English major, unless you happen to be chest deep in a classicist dissertation of some kind. However, Sappho is perhaps one of the more influential writers of lyric poetry, or any poetry really.  A great deal of her life isn't altogether confirmable and much of it is overshadowed by some kind of slander or rumor. Some say she was a stone-cold fox; others insist not to get ahead of ourselves. The above comment of her being a substantial poet, however, is difficult to deny. 

Under the guise of a poet and scholar Mary Barnard, Sappho's fragments are now in lean, digestible tidbits of aesthetic fluidity.  By fragments, I mean brief but not necessarily incomplete.  Sure, these works were not composed for a formal collection per se, but what's gathered makes the book a window with a terrific view of Sappho's wordplay.  Instead of your standard buff epic warrior, you have a confessional, somewhat abstract and deeply probing art form.  Poems can be no more than a few brief lines.  At first, they may seem simplistic and opaque ("Pain penetrates/Me drop/by drop"), but upon a few more glances, Sappho was one of the few who excelled in conveying more than was written.  Her work is deeply personal, reflecting complications in relationships with men, women (not altogether sexual), and other such things in life that hasn't much changed since the crash and burn of the classic era.

Reading through these, it would seem as if Sappho is more akin to the shy girl who writes the same kind of stuff in between writing essays for Vassar and Bennington, than with Homer or even Ovid.  Yet don't let that confuse you for something that sucks.  Nay, Sappho's imagery, questions and observations, though taking no more than a few seconds to read, offer a much longer appreciation of its beauty and a curious dissection of what get people all misty/hot and bothered in those days (with the exception of certain Roman Emperors).