Will I love If Not, Winter?

I was drawn to Sappho as a teenager, and in many ways, her poems are classic poems of teen angst, love, jealousy, and rejection. Over the years, I’ve also come to admire her poetic craft and skill at composing beautiful verse, as well as the music of her poetry.

If only more of her poems had survived! Even many of the surviving poems are marked by gaps and omissions. The fragmentariness of the poems is part of their mystique. An accomplished poet, Anne Carson captures the force and charm of these ancient love songs superbly in her version.

The woman whose voice comes through most clearly from the classical world is Sappho, a powerful love poet I’ve been obsessed with since college. Plato called her “the tenth Muse,” and she was hugely influential in antiquity, although much of what we have now is fragmented.

Anne Carson is both a poet and a classicist. She’s been deeply engaged with Sappho for a long time, and her recent translation is a marvel—as evocative and compelling as Sappho is in Greek. With its brackets and broken-off lines, the translation also reminds us of all we’ve lost.