Two new poem fragments by Sappho discovered and translated

Reading Sappho is radiant and frustrating, like being smiled upon by a goddess who is missing some teeth. Frustrating because her poems survive in quotations and fragments, snippets of often homoerotic desire coming down to us from seventh-century Greece. (Out of what is believed to be nine volumes of work, scholars have recovered only one complete Sappho lyric.)

Radiant because, as the writer Kenneth Rexroth said of her, “Wherever enough words remain to form a coherent context, they give one another a unique luster, an effulgence found nowhere else. Presentational immediacy of the image, overwhelming urgency of personal involvement—in no other poet are these two prime factors of lyric poetry raised to so great a power.”

But while passion and a sense of elusiveness or loss seem important to our understanding of Sappho, they aren’t the full story. So it’s great news that two more of the poet’s verses have recently surfaced on a third-century scroll.

As the Guardian reports, “the poems came to light when an anonymous private collector in London showed a piece of papyrus fragment to Dr Dirk Obbink, a papyrologist at Oxford University.” Obbink has described the meter, dialect, and themes as “indubitably” hers. The more intact lyric contains biographical tidbits, mentioning Sappho’s brothers Charaxus and Larichus; the second is a moan of unrequited love.

lovedust wrote:
I do know that Camille Paglia considered Sappho one of only two female geniuses in the history of literature.

However as she considered herself the other I automatically  assumed she was wrong about Sappho too.

Ben_Reilly wrote:

lovedust wrote:
I do know that Camille Paglia considered Sappho one of only two female geniuses in the history of literature.

However as she considered herself the other I automatically  assumed she was wrong about Sappho too.

I think Paglia is wrong about a lot of things ... didn't she say A&E was "Stalinist" for suspending Phil Robertson (for what, a week?) -- I think she's turned into one of those "notable people" who's resorted to saying outrageous things for attention.

veya_victaous wrote:I think Sappho must be up there, too many other great poets of history comment on quality of her work.

Anyone with positive reviews from Virgil (arguably the best poet in history) has got to have something to offer.