Sappho: A New Translation

Mary Barnard studied at Reed College from 1928 to 1932,^[1] where she was one of the few students to study ancient Greek.^[2] In 1930 she was given a copy of Henry Thornton Wharton's translation of the poetry of Sappho as a birthday present. This inspired her to adapt fragments of Sappho, such as in "Love Poem", a four-line adaptation of the twenty-eight-line "Ode to Aphrodite".^[3] In 1933, she began a correspondence with the poet Ezra Pound, sending him six of her poems.^[4]

In 1950 Barnard was bedridden for six months after contracting hepatitis B; during this time she returned to studying Greek,^[4] and was sent a copy of Salvatore Quasimodo's Italian-language anthology Lirici Greci (Greek Lyric Poets).^[5] Inspired by this, and encouraged by Pound, to whom she sent early drafts, Barnard began to produce her own translations of Sappho's poetry.^[5] Existing translations of Sappho's works were often inaccurate. In the poem "Static" Barnard complained of their inadequacies, describing them as "whiskered mumble / ment of grammarians: / Greek pterodactyls / and Victorian dodos".^[6] She spent about two years working on her translation,^[7] recalling in her memoir that each fragment went through "about forty versions".^[8] Barnard completed her translation in 1953; it was published in 1958.^[9]

Sappho: A New Translation was published by the University of California Press. It is dedicated to Douglas and Mary Paige,^[10] who had sent Barnard the copy of Lirici Greci which inspired her translation.^[11] It comprises a foreword by Dudley Fitts, one hundred poems in translation, a note on the translation by Barnard, a list of sources for the poems, with their corresponding number in John Maxwell Edmonds' Loeb Classical Library edition, a bibliography and index.^[10] Barnard's translation is based on the Greek text of Edmonds' Loeb edition.^[12] She groups the poems into six sections,^[13] which – rather than following the conventional order – she arranges to give a narrative of Sappho's life from youth to old age.^[14] Within Part One, focused on Sappho's youth, Barnard further organises the poems by time of day, with the first poem in the section set at dawn and the last at night.^[15] Two poems precede the main six sections as a programmatic preface.^[16]

Barnard's translations render Sappho's poetry in contemporary language, in contrast to the old-fashioned diction preferred by previous translators.^[17] In some cases Barnard alters or combines fragments.^[18] Where the surviving Greek text is too fragmentary to fully translate, she gives a conjectured reconstruction,^[19] for instance in the fourth and fifth stanzas of Sappho 16.^[20] The poems are given titles,^[18] and translated in free verse.^[21] She does not always retain the stanzaic structure of Sappho's poems: she often uses three-line stanzas where Sappho's poems are in four-line Sapphics,^[18] while for Sappho 130 she divides a two-line fragment, which survives only through being quoted by the second century AD grammarian Hephaestion, over six lines and three stanzas.^[20]

Barnard's free verse was based on her principle of the "balanced line",^[22] in which each line could be divided in two, and each half had the same metrical weight.^[23] For example, her translation of Sappho 94 Voigt (Sappho 42 Barnard) is headed "I have had not one word from her", which Sarah Barnsley scans as ◡ ◡ – – / – – ◡ ◡ : the syllables are exactly symmetrical.^[24] The titles added by Barnard are mostly exactly balanced in this manner, while in the body of the poems the balance is more approximate.^[25]

Barnard's translation was both commercially and critically successful. Initially she had difficulty finding a publisher.^[26] Both Anchor Books and Viking Press rejected the manuscript because they did not think that it was commercially viable. As Barnard recalled in her memoir, "[Anchor] liked the poems, or so they said, but Sappho would never sell".^[27] Despite these difficulties, the translation had sold 100,000 copies by 1994^[28] and as of 2013^[update] had been continuously in print with the University of California Press for 55 years.^[29]

Early reviewers criticized Barnard for choosing to translate into free verse. Vivian Mercier, reviewing for Poetry, and W. B. Stanford, in Hermathena, both complained that Barnard had not used more structured meters,^[30][12] while the reviewer in The Classical Outlook suggested that the translations would have been more memorable had they been in rhyming verse.^[31] More recent critics have praised Barnard's prosody: in 1978, Anita Helle wrote in The Columbian that this was the "most important innovation" of Sappho: A New Translation.^[32] The choice to translate Sappho into free verse rather than attempting a metrical imitation has been followed by many subsequent translators.^[33]

In his review of Barnard's translation, Burton Raffel described Barnard's work as "as nearly perfect an English translation as one can find, a great translation, an immensely moving translation, complete, beautiful, deserving of endless praise".^[34] The classicist Guy Davenport, who published his own translation of Sappho's work in 1965, called it "surely the best Greek translation in American literature".^[35] In a 1994 review, Lorrie Goldensohn said that it was still one of the best English translations of Sappho's poetry.^[36] Barnard's translation is particularly influential in the US, where according to Josephine Balmer it is "iconic".^[37] It has been set to music twice, by the composers Sheila Silver and David Ward-Steinman.^[38]

Barnard's translation has influenced many subsequent writers. Bruce Whiteman identifies the translations of Sappho's works by Davenport and Jim Powell following in Barnard's poetic lineage.^[39] Josephine Balmer acknowledges Barnard as an inspiration for her own translation of Sappho's poetry.^[40] The classicist Page duBois has credited reading Sappho: A New Translation as a teenager with inspiring her to learn ancient Greek.^[41]

• Barnard, Mary (1994). "A Communication on Greek Metric, Ezra Pound, and "Sappho"". Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. 23 (1): 147–152. JSTOR 24726073.