(We need only look to Proust for the supreme confirmation.) “It is a notion that, once adopted, has a powerful effect on one’s habits and representations of love,” Carson observes, and the modern heart can’t but flinch with recognition.

In it, she makes the discomposing observation that the poem embodies an internalized inheritance of Ancient Greek culture, which continues to haunt our modern lives: the conception of eros as lack, manifested in our tendency to define love by loss, or anticipatory loss, or the anterograde loss of what has never been had. He seems to me equal to the gods that manįor when I look at you, even a moment, no speakingĬarson’s translation of Fragment 31 began on the pages of her 1986 classic Eros the Bittersweet ( public library). My pulse beats quick, my breath heaves short,Ī generation later, Tennyson tried his tenderer hand at it:īrimm’d with delirious draughts of warmest life.īut the finest - for its literary splendor, its intellectual elegance, and its psychological insight - comes from a 2002 translation of Sappho’s fragments by the visionary Canadian poet, essayist, classicist, and translator Anne Carson: In the early 1820s, Byron translated it thus: It is hardly surprising that some of humanity’s finest poets have wielded their original genius at Sappho’s Fragment 31. At its best, such meta-creation lives up to the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s lovely notion of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original.” (Available as a print.)īecause it touches on one of the most universal human themes, Fragment 31 is one of Sappho’s most translated fragments, which also means the most interpreted - for poetry in translation is an exponent of creation to begin with, but especially when translating the ancient tongue of a bygone civilization from a world alien to our own.

Death of Sappho by Miguel Carbonell Selva, 1881. 570 BC) - the Tenth Muse, inventor of the personal lyric, and poet laureate of heartbreak - in one of the few surviving fragments of her poetry. No one has voiced this hunger with more howling precision than Sappho (c. It is also one of the most universal human experiences - homily on the elemental tragedy that the ever-open mouth of choice hungers for more than what chance grants us, so that we live desiring more than we have. Jealousy may be the most staggering scale discrepancy of the inner world - an enormous all-consuming emotion pinched into extreme smallness of spirit.

Anne carson sappho translation