If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
translated by Anne Carson
Knopf, 397 pp., $27.50
It isn’t often that one looks forward with excitement to a new translation of an ancient and much translated text, but that’s how I anticipated reading Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s complete works. As a poet and classicist, Carson (who is director of graduate studies in classics at McGill University in Montreal) seems like the perfect interpolator of the ancient Greek poet’s lyrics, which exist only as fragments of papyruses and parts of poems used as examples in (slightly less) ancient Greek grammars and treatises. Carson’s ferocious innovations as a poet — she is the author of the exhilarating Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse — make the match with the famously passionate Greek poet particularly tantalizing. And since both poets display a penchant for the sparkier emotions — anger, lust, revenge, frustration — there was no way this was going to be a boring read.
Only one of Sappho’s lyrics survives intact, and one of the bold moves Carson makes in the translation, which includes all extant scraps including those of only one word, is to use brackets where there were holes or breaks in the papyric pieces. Although other translators have employed a combination of brackets, parentheses, and ellipses to indicate lost phrases and letters, Carson’s use of just brackets and white space is particularly stark, calling attention to the many places in the verse, where we just don’t know what happens next or before. In her introduction, Carson offers this rationale for the choice: “Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp — brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.”
This is a great wish, and the placement of single lines on a page or words bordered by brackets creates some stylishly mysterious effects as in, fragments No. 8
]
]Atthis, for you
and No. 162
with what eyes?
But I found the cumulative experience of reading page after page of bracket-beetled text to be a bit vexing and typographically distracting. (After a while, the brackets made me think of staples and words hanging off of bracketed shelving units. So much for imaginal
adventuring.) It was a relief to get to Carson’s elegant translations of the longer lyrics, and even more satisfying to read her notes on the poems, which showcase both her fluent erudition and her sense of fun. Carson imparts drama and verve to many of the otherwise anorectic fragments in her zippy notes on Sapphic scholarship, such as this one on No. 46: “This fragment is cited by Herodian in his treatise On Anomalous Words because it contains a perky word for ‘cushion.'”
The notes seamlessly incorporate literary morsels spanning the millennia — George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and a letter by Emily Dickinson are in there along with a wonderful aside on the cult of Adonis (it involves lettuce). And for those of us who care about such things, Carson’s explications of etymology and Greek prosody make the book a delectably informative read. Here is her comment on the word “unmanageable,” which appears in fragment No. 130:
“unmanageable”: a word made from the root machan- (cf.
English “machine”) and cognate with words for
“contrivance, device, instrument, means, technique.”
Eros is a creature against whom no technology avails.
Since, the book requires a lot of flipping pages to and from the Notes and similarly idiosyncratic Who’s Who section, for maximum satisfaction, I recommend reading it with a good bookmark or set of Post-its.
This article appears in April 25 • 2003.