Sweetbitter Love by Sappho6/3/2023 ![]() ![]() Willis Barnstone has given us a close and beautiful lyrical version. The clarity of her voice, its absolute candor, its amazing fresh authority-whether in addressing a goddess, dancers before a night altar, the moon and stars, a sweet apple or mountain hyacinth, a lamb or cricket, a lover or companion-are qualities that compel us today as in antiquity. ![]() Though time has reduced the nine volumes of her work to a handful of complete poems and a collection of fragments, each word and phrase that survives is poignantly significant. Her poems combine an impression of intimate self-involvement with an almost modern sense of detachment. In Sappho’s lyrics we hear for the first time in the West the words of an individual woman of her own world: her apprehension of sun and orchards the troubles and summits of love, desire, and friendship. ![]() Plato, a century after her death, referred to her as “the Tenth Muse,” and Longinos, in his first-century treatise “On the Sublime,” uses her verse to exemplify that transcendent quality in literature. Sappho is the greatest lyric poet of antiquity. ![]()
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