If Not, Winter

[Sarah]

It makes me uneasy to be underwhelmed by a book the rest of the planet rates very highly, but underwhelmed I was. I am neither a Greek scholar nor have I read Sappho previously, so maybe this was the wrong place to start.
There were definitely some good fragments in the book, but a lot of the time I was having an emperor's-new-clothes experience. For example, one page has the fragment:

sinful

Another page says -

]
]all
]but different
]hair
]

The ]s represent places in the original Sappho where the papyrus is destroyed or illegible. There are fuller pages than these, and many of the poems and fragments are supplemented by end notes, which are in part explanatory.

I do like the frequent violets, and the "dripping (pain)" but give me Emily Dickinson any day.

[Jenna]

A few years ago, in New York, I saw a very weird stage production inspired by this book, called "Bracko." You can watch it online here: http://www.cornell.edu/video/anne-car...

Unlike many previous translators of Sappho, Anne Carson makes no attempt to disguise the fragmentary nature of Sappho's surviving work. Instead, she loudly calls your attention to it over and over through her use of brackets. By putting the work's fragmentariness front and center, Carson is emphasizing an aspect of the work that Sappho never intended to be part of the work---a controversial artistic choice on Carson's part. I recommend exploring other translators' interpretations of Sappho; you may end up deciding that another translator captures Sappho's "spirit" better than Carson does. Sappho is a poet whom I find I appreciate the most when I am immersing myself in multiple different translations of her work simultaneously.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.

[Sarah]

Yes, I mostly wonder -after this- how much time I can devote to Sappho. I also like comparing translations and mutations (Szymborska is a favorite in this case), but I now think Sappho is probably not a poet I need to explore further.

[Hesper]

The fragments made this for me. It was a little surreal to gulp it all down in one sitting, like hearing only snatches of a slightly alien conversation.

I have no actual idea if I even like Sappho; I am, however, a fan of her fragments. Whatever's missing may be completely mundane, or really bad, or the most brilliant words ever strung together, but I'll never know, and that's what made this book so prefect for me.

[Caroline]

It seems to me rather unfair on Sappho to produce a book of her poems where most of the words have been eroded by time and decay. I suspect I'd be underwhelmed by this edition too.

Were there any which were more complete S?

Sappho is one of those poets that I've not got around to yet but I've liked what I've just found on poets.org

[Jenna]

There are no editions that are more complete, but other editions try to elide over the work's fragmentary nature, either via extrapolation (where possible) or via deletion of sentence fragments whose endings cannot be guessed (e.g., deletion of the cryptic sentence fragment "Even a person of poverty..." from the end of Fragment #31). Some translators combine adjacent sentence fragments into a single sentence or whatever they deem appropriate to make the text run more smoothly. Of course, these artistic liberties are controversial in their own way, but I do find that they take the emphasis away from the work's fragmentariness (which isn't Sappho's fault and has nothing to do with why she was admired in ancient times!) and shift the focus to her personality/passion/style.

[Jenna]

I personally have loved Sappho since teenhood and, in some ways, have tried to model my poetry after hers. It's hard for me to imagine that anyone could resist the charms of Fragment #31 or of the Anactoria poem.

[Sarah]

As Jenna said, I have the impression this is the book that represents her work as it actually stands, without trying to fill in the blanks. I agree that filling in the blanks creates a possibly unfair and definitely imprecise presentation of the work, and think the missing bits in this make it more evocative. Nevertheless, I wasn't very moved.

[Jenna]

This thought-provoking discussion just inspired me to write a review of the edition of Sappho's poetry that first caused me to fall in love with her work: Mary Barnard's wonderful 1960s translations. If anyone is interested, it's here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Sarah]

Ok, your review suggests I read the Barnard translation. Smile.

[Caroline]

S. wrote: "Ok, your review suggests I read the Barnard translation. Smile."

Me too.

[Jenna]

Did you see this article? Hopefully legit; it made my heart beat faster...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...

[Sarah]

I did! Thanks for linking here.

[Yigru]

I must say thank you for this negative review thread. I stepped in here randomly, out of one of the numerous notifications I get, and my eye stopped on "emperor's-new-clothes experience" (in general what excites me seems to get comments like this, so it obviously rung a bell!).

It is the first time I hear of "If Not, Winter", so the idea of an edition that transcribes (and translates in this case) the very few fragments left from an ancient poet, fragments traditionally "completed" by scholars, filled me with awe instantly. Now I know what my next conceptualist project will be! No, don't imagine I am going to burn in front of the MoMA innumerable pages of poetry and then make a book with all the words left after extinguishing! I'll probably just take my thousands of pages written and erase frantically (not physically since I am not actually pyromaniac) until very few remain... My only volume of poetry published until now officially (on paper and with ISBN) has only almost 40 pages, as in some of the texts I simply assembled bits and pieces from previous, much larger "sessions". So my latest idea is just a natural step away and a lot more meaningful than many of the schemes that I've seen in "Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing" (because, unlike fair-and-square conceptualists, I don't cut expression).