Since all of Sappho’s poems are song-lyrics, I opted to translate them as English lyric poems. Rhyme, an important part of this tradition, is useful in translating Sappho for two reasons: (1) it is one of the ways English writers indicate that something is song-like; and (2) individual lines within Sappho’s poems had emphatic endings, usually two long syllables, and rhyme preserves the integrity of the line within the stanza in much the same way.
