Josephine Balmer writes:
"After hearing his nephew sing one of Sappho's lyric songs, the Athenian lawgiver Solon ordered the boy to teach it to him immediately. When asked why he was so eager, Solon replied: "So that I may die knowing it." This story illustrates the high regard in which Sappho's poetry was held by the ancients. It also reminds us that her poems were composed for music, to be performed in public, often at religious festivals. Sadly, of the ten books attributed to her, perhaps more than 10,000 lines in all, only two hundred or so short fragments survive, some only a few lines, some a few words, some just a string of letters. Their poet is even more elusive. She probably lived on the island of Lesbos c.600 BCE. But despite her many guises throughout history – deviant, lesbian, a sometimes devoted, sometimes adulterous, wife and mother, even political activist – she always eludes us. For her translator, Sappho's fractured verse presents many challenges. As editors interpret and reinterpret damaged texts, the difficulty here is often not how to translate but what to translate. Such considerations have been brought even more sharply into focus by recent discoveries of new papyri with slightly more complete, and hence slightly different, versions of previously translated poems. What remains certain is the force of her sensual verse – so powerful that fragment 31, her description of the physical sensations aroused in the lover at the sight of a loved one, was used by physicians for centuries as a diagnostic worksheet for cases of love sickness."
The following fragment is from Sappho: Poems and Fragments, edited and translated by Josephine Balmer, Bloodaxe Books, 2018:
Sappho fragment 96
[...Atthis,]
although she is in Sardis,
her thoughts often stray here, to us...
[...for you know that she honoured] you
as if you were a goddess
and, most of all, delighted in your song.
But now she surpasses all the women
of Lydia, like the moon,
rose-fingered, after the sun has set,
shining brighter than all the stars; its light
stretches out over the salt-
filled sea and the fields brimming with flowers:
the beautiful dew falls and the roses
and the delicate chervil
and many-flowered honey-clover bloom.
But wandering here and there, she recalls
gentle Atthis with desire
and her tender heart is heavy with grief...
Josephine Balmer is a poet and classical translator. Her translations of Sappho have been continuously in print since 1984 and in 1989 were shortlisted for the inaugural US Lambda Literary Awards. In 2018, they were reissued in an expanded edition to include newly-discovered fragments (Bloodaxe Books). Her recent collection, The Paths of Survival (Shearsman), was shortlisted for the 2017 London Hellenic Prize. Other works include Letting Go (Agenda Editions, 2017), The Word for Sorrow (Salt, 2007), Chasing Catullus (Bloodaxe, 2004), Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (Bloodaxe, 2004) and Classical Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 1996). She has also published a study of classical translation and versioning, Piecing Together the Fragments (OUP, 2013).