![]() ![]() Anne Carson’s new translations, with facing Greek text, make effective use of blank space and brackets to convey the feeling of a torn or burned scrap of papyrus. Reconstructing Sappho from what remains is like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw.īoth scholars and creative writers have made much of Sappho’s fragmentariness. But even with these additions, we have only about 3 per cent of what she wrote. ![]() Then, around the turn of the 20th century, some scraps of papyrus from an ancient rubbish tip at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt turned out to contain fragments of poetry – including substantial chunks of Sophocles, Euripides and Sappho. Until the end of the 19th century, these two poems were practically all that was known from the work of the poet Plato called ‘the tenth Muse’. A few longish passages from other poems have been preserved in other authors: the most famous is Fragment 31 (‘He seems to me equal to gods’), quoted at length in On the Sublime. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the ‘Ode to Aphrodite’ (Fragment 1), which is quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. ![]() Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. ![]()
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