Biology:Sappho: A New Translation
| Author | Mary Barnard |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Publisher | University of California Press |
Publication date | 1958 |
| ISBN | ISBN:0-520-22312-8 |
Sappho: A New Translation is a 1958 book by Mary Barnard with a foreword by Dudley Fitts. Inspired by Salvatore Quasimodo's Lirici Greci and encouraged by Ezra Pound, with whom Barnard had corresponded since 1933, she translated 100 poems of the archaic Greek poet Sappho into English free verse. Though some early reviewers criticised Barnard's choice not to use a more structured meter, her translation was both commercially and critically successful, and her decision to translate the poems into free verse rather than attempting to imitate Sappho's metre has been followed by many subsequent translators.
Background
Mary Barnard studied Greek while a student at Reed College, and in 1930 was given a copy of Henry Thornton Wharton's translation of Sappho. This inspired her to adapt fragments of Sappho, such as in "Love Poem", a four-line adaptation of the Ode to Aphrodite.[1] In 1933, she began a correspondence with the poet Ezra Pound, sending him six of her poems. In 1950 she was bedridden for six months after contracting hepatitis B; during this time she returned to studying Greek,[2] and was sent a copy of Salvatore Quasimodo's Italian-language anthology Lirici Greci.[3] Inspired by this, and encouraged by Pound, to whom she sent early drafts, Barnard began to produce her own translations of Sappho.[3] She spent about two years working on the translation,[4] recalling in her memoir that each fragment went through "about forty versions".[5] Barnard completed her translation in 1953; it was published in 1958.[6]
Translation
To an army wife, in Sardis:
Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some, again,
will maintain that the swift oars
of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.
This is easily proved: did
not Helen—she who had scanned
the flower of the world's manhood—
choose as first among men one
who laid Troy's honour in ruin?
warped to his will, forgetting
love due her own blood, her own
child, she wandered far with him.
So Anactoria, although you
being far away forget us,
the dear sound of your footstep
and light glancing in your eyes
would move me more than glitter
of Lydian horse or armored
tread of mainland infantry
Sappho: A New Translation was published by the University of California Press. It comprises a foreword by Dudley Fitts, one hundred poems in translation, a note on the translation by Barnard, a list of sources for the poems, with their corresponding number in John Maxwell Edmonds' Loeb Classical Library edition, a bibliography and index.[7] Barnard's translation is based on the Greek text of Edmonds' Loeb edition.[8] She groups the poems into six sections,[9] which she arranges to give a narrative of Sappho's life from youth to old age.[10]
Barnard's translations render Sappho's poetry in modern language, in contrast to the old-fashioned diction preferred by previous translators.[11] Where the surviving Greek text is too fragmentary to fully translate, she gives a conjectured reconstruction, for instance in the fourth and fifth stanzas of Sappho 16.[12] The poems are given titles,[13] and translated in free verse.[14] She does not always retain the stanzaic structure of Sappho's poems: she often uses tercets where Sappho's poems are in Sapphic stanzas,[13] while for Sappho 130 she divides a couplet quoted by Hephaestion over six lines and three stanzas.[12]
Reception
Barnard's translation of Sappho was both commercially and critically successful. Though initially she had difficulty finding a publisher – Anchor Books rejected the manuscript, saying that "Sappho would never sell"[15] – the translation had sold 100,000 copies by 1994[16] and (As of 2013) had been continuously in print with the University of California Press for 55 years.[17]
Early reviewers criticized Barnard for choosing to translate into free verse. Vivian Mercier, reviewing for Poetry, and W. B. Stanford in Hermathena, both complained that Barnard had not used more structured meters,[18][8] while the reviewer in The Classical Outlook suggested that the translations would have been more memorable had they been in rhyming verse.[19] More recent critics have praised Barnard's use of meter: in 1978, Anita Helle wrote in The Columbian that this was the "most important innovation" of Sappho: A New Translation.[20] The choice to translate Sappho into free verse rather than attempting a metrical imitation has been followed by many subsequent translators.[21]
In his review of Sappho, Burton Raffel described Barnard's work as "as nearly perfect an English translation as one can find, a great translation, an immensely moving translation, complete, beautiful, deserving of endless praise".[22] The classicist and translator Guy Davenport called Barnard's Sappho "surely the best Greek translation in American literature".[23] In a 1994 review, Lorrie Goldensohn said that it was still one of the best English translations of Sappho.[24] Barnard's translation is particularly influential in the US, where according to Josephine Balmer it is "iconic".[25] It has been set to music twice, by the composers Sheila Silver and David Ward-Steinman.[26]
References
- ↑ Barnsley 2013a, p. 76.
- ↑ Donahue 2009.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Piantanida 2021, p. 110.
- ↑ Gordon 1994, pp. 172.
- ↑ Barnard 1984, p. 283.
- ↑ Gordon 1994, p. 174.
- ↑ Barnard 1958.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Stanford 1958, p. 83.
- ↑ Balmer 2013, p. 96.
- ↑ Christy 1994, pp. 31–34.
- ↑ Prins 1996, pp. 64–65.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Englert 1999.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Goff & Harloe 2021, p. 396.
- ↑ Christy 1994, p. 33.
- ↑ Barnsley 2013a, p. 85.
- ↑ Reed College 2001.
- ↑ Barnsley 2013a, p. 71.
- ↑ Mercier 1959, p. 189.
- ↑ R. M. 1960.
- ↑ Helle 1978.
- ↑ Grover 2017.
- ↑ Raffel 1965, p. 236.
- ↑ Barnsley 2013b, p. 89.
- ↑ Goldensohn 1994, p. 13.
- ↑ Balmer 2013, p. 49.
- ↑ Barnsley 2013b, p. 124.
Works cited
- Balmer, Josephine (2013). Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-958509-0. https://archive.org/details/piecingtogetherf0000balm/page/n3/mode/2up.
- Barnard, Mary (1958). Sappho: A New Translation. University of California Press. https://archive.org/details/sappho0000sapp.
- Barnard, Mary (1984). Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir. University of California Press.
- Barnsley, Sarah (2013a). "Making It New: Sappho, Mary Barnard and American Modernism". Synthesis 5.
- Barnsley, Sarah (2013b). Mary Barnard: American Imagist. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-4855-8.
- Christy, Angela (1994). "The Mary Barnard Translation of Sappho". Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 23 (1): 25–63.
- Donahue, Bill (1 September 2009). "Channelling Sappho". Reed Magazine. https://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/autumn2009/features/channeling_sappho/.
- Englert, Walter (2 August 1999). "The Words She Commands: Translating Sappho From the Heart". Reed Magazine. https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/articles/1999/englert-sappho-barnard.html.
- Goff, Barbara; Harloe, Katherine (2021). "Sappho in the 20th Century and Beyond". in Finglass, P. J.; Kelly, Adrian. The Cambridge Companion to Sappho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-316-63877-4.
- Goldensohn, Lorrie (1994). "'The Speech of Her Stringed Shell': Mary Barnard's 'Sappho'". Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 23 (1): 13–23.
- Gordon, David (1994). "Ezra Pound to Mary Barnard: An ABC of Metrics". Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 23 (1): 159–179.
- Grover, Emma (29 October 2017). "Finding Sappho: Four Translations in Conversation". The Stanford Daily. https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/29/finding-sappho-four-translations-in-conversation/.
- Helle, Anita (28 May 1978). "Nothing Will Keep Her From Her Poetry". The Columbian.
- Mercier, Vivian (1959). "Ovid and Sappho in Translation". Poetry 95 (3): 185–189.
- Piantanida, Cecilia (2021). Sappho and Catullus in 20th Century Italian and American Poetry. Bloomsbury.
- Prins, Yopie (1996). "Sappho's Afterlife in Translation". in Greene, Ellen. Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission. University of California Press.
- Raffel, Burton (1965). "Mary Barnard's Sappho". The Hudson Review 18 (2): 236–241. doi:10.2307/3848520.
- "Her translation turned Sappho into a modernist icon: Mary Ethel Barnard '32". Reed Magazine. November 2001. https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/november2001/mary-e-barnard-1932.html.
- R. M. (1960). "[Review] Sappho: A New Translation". The Classical Outlook 38 (3).
- Stanford, W. B. (1958). "[Review] Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics and Sappho: A New Translation". Hermathena 92.
 |  |
