The Lesbian Lyre

Hailed by Plato as the “Tenth Muse” of ancient Greek poetry, Sappho is inarguably antiquity’s greatest lyric poet. Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, and writing amorously of women and men alike, she is the namesake lesbian. What’s left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary. Shrouded in mystery, she is nonetheless repeatedly translated and discussed – no, appropriated – by all. Sappho has most recently undergone a variety of treatments by agenda-driven scholars and so-called poet-translators with little or no knowledge of Greek. Classicist-translator Jeffrey Duban debunks the postmodernist scholarship by which Sappho is interpreted today and offers translations reflecting the charm and elegant simplicity of the originals. Duban provides a reader-friendly overview of Sappho’s times and themes, exploring her eroticism and Greek homosexuality overall. He introduces us to Sappho’s highly cultured island home, to its lyre-accompanied musical legends, and to the fabled beauty of Lesbian women. Not least, he emphasizes the proximity of Lesbos to Troy, making the translation and enjoyment of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey a further focus. More than anything else, argues Duban, it is free verse and its rampant legacy – and no two persons more than Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound – that bear responsibility for the ruin of today’s classics in translation, to say nothing of poetry in the twentieth century. Beyond matters of reflection for classicists, Duban provides a far-ranging beginner’s guide to classical literature, with forays into Spenser and Milton, and into the colonial impulse of Virgil, Spenser, and the West at large.

By combining the ancient mysteries of Sappho with the contemporary wizardry of one of our most fearless and original poets, If Not, Winter provides a tantalizing window onto the genius of a woman whose lyric power spans millennia. Of the nine books of lyrics the ancient Greek poet Sappho is said to have composed, only one poem has survived complete. The rest are fragments. In this miraculous new translation, acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson presents all of Sappho’s fragments, in Greek and in English, as if on the ragged scraps of papyrus that preserve them, inviting a thrill of discovery and conjecture that can be described only as electric—or, to use Sappho’s words, as “thin fire . . . racing under skin.” "Sappho's verse has been elevated to new heights in [this] gorgeous translation." --The New York Times "Carson is in many ways [Sappho's] ideal translator....Her command of language is hones to a perfect edge and her approach to the text, respectful yet imaginative, results in verse that lets Sappho shine forth." --Los Angeles Times

Seminal essays from one of the most prominent scholars of Hellenistic poetry

The Milan Papyrus ( P. Mil. Volg. VIII. 309), containing a collection of epigrams apparently all by Posidippus of Pella, provides one of the most exciting new additions to the corpus of Greek literature in decades. It not only contains over 100 previously unknown epigrams by one of the most prominent poets of the third century BC, but as an artefact it constitutes our earliest example of a Greek poetry book. In addition to a poetic translation of the entire corpus of Posidippus' poetry, this volume contains essays about Posidippus by experts in the fields of papyrology, Hellenistic and Augustan literature, Ptolemaic history, and Graeco-Roman visual culture.

Sappho sang her poetry to the accompaniment of the lyre on the Greek island of Lesbos over 2500 years ago. Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets—the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time. Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including "new" Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers. Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.

Sappho, in the words of poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), was “simply nothing less – as she is certainly nothing more – than the greatest poet who ever was at all.” Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho, the namesake lesbian, wrote amorously of men and women alike, exhibiting both masculine and feminine tendencies in her poetry and life. What’s left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary, and thus ever subject to speculation and study. The Shipwreck Sea highlights the love poetry of the soulful Sappho, the impassioned Ibycus, and the playful Anacreon, among other Greek lyric poets of the age (7th to 5th centuries BC), with verse translations into English by author Jeffrey Duban. The book also features selected Latin poets who wrote on erotic themes – Catullus, Lucretius, Horace, and Petronius – and poems by Charles Baudelaire, with his milestone rejoinder to lesbian love (“Lesbos”) and, in the same stanzaic meter, a turn to the consoling power of memory in love’s more frequently tormented recall (“Le Balcon”). Duban also translates selected Carmina Burana of Carl Orff, the poems frequently Anacreontic in spirit. The book’s essays include a comprehensive analysis with a new translation of Horace’s famed Odes 1.5 (“To Pyrrha”), in which the theme of (love’s) shipwreck predominates, and an opening treatise-length argument – exploring painting, sculpture, literature, and other Western art forms – on the irrelevance of gender to artistic creation. (No, Homer was not a woman, and it would make no difference if she were.) Twenty full-color artwork reproductions, masterpieces in their own right, illustrate and bring Duban’s argument to life. Finally, Duban presents a selection of his own love poems, imitations and pastiches written over a lifetime – these composed in the “classical mode”, which is the leitmotif of this volume. The Shipwreck Sea is a delightful and continually thought-provoking companion to The Lesbian Lyre, both books vividly demonstrating that classicism yet thrives in our time, despite the modernism marshaled against it.

Concentrating on the interaction between contemporary Hellenistic poets, this book attempts to chart the complex dynamics of Alexandrian poetical imitation and reception in the light of poetical self-positioning.