Matt's review
If Not, Winter
by Anne Carson
Matt's review
If Not, Winter by Anne Carson
Matt's review
rating:
bookshelves:
classics,
poetry
Sappho is one of the greatest poets out of ancient Greece. Her poems are beautiful, personal, and well structured. They also come down to us largely in fragments. Anne Carson, a phenomenal poet in her own right, has used the fragmentary nature of Sappho's surviving oeuvre to create a translation that is a work of art in itself. Rather than covering the gaps, or marking them in the same tedious way that is often done with other translations of fragmented works, Carson makes the gaps an important part of each piece. This book is not just a good translation of Sappho's poems, it's also a monument to all of the works that we have lost. The organization of her translations provides the reader with a visceral sense of that loss. The title is one of the fragments, all we can do is wonder what the rest of the poem would have been like.
