About This Edition

Reading Sappho presents the poems of Sappho in the English prose translation of Henry Thornton Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation. The text is the fifth edition (London: John Lane, 1908; pp. xxxii+217), taken from Project Gutenberg eBook #57390. The edition is in the public domain.

The Source

Wharton’s book first appeared in 1885 and was reissued in 1887, 1895, 1898 and 1908. The title page of the fifth edition lists each earlier edition with its page count, its illustrations and its publisher: David Stott for the first two, John Lane for the later three. The fourth and fifth editions add a memoir of Wharton.

In the preface to the first edition Wharton states that the book translates all one hundred and seventy fragments that Sappho’s latest German editor thought might be ascribed to her. He describes the translation as a literal English prose version, and he gives for each fragment the Greek, the literal version, English metrical translations by other writers, and a note on the author by whom the fragment was preserved.

The edition keeps Wharton’s own matter: the prefaces, the Life of Sappho, Sappho to Phaon (a translation of Ovid’s verse letter) and the bibliography. The publisher’s advertisements are left out.

Conventions

Wharton’s wording, spelling and “thou” forms are kept as printed. Only transcription errors confirmed on the printed page are corrected. Most fragments appear with their number and Wharton’s literal translation; some survive only as an ancient writer’s report. A Notes section holds his note on where the fragment survives, the verse renderings he collected, and the Greek.

Wharton numbers the fragments 1 to 170, with an added 57A, in 168 entries, and each entry has its own page. Where he prints two numbers as one entry (7 and 8, 107 and 108, 122 and 123), the two share a page and the record carries both numbers. Most fragments have his literal prose translation; some survive only as an ancient writer’s report, and the index lists these as reported by that writer in place of opening words. A fragment too short to stand alone, such as a single word cited by a grammarian, still has a page, which is excluded from search indexing.

Numbering

Sappho’s fragments have no single numbering. Each editor numbered the fragments known in his day, and later finds were added in new places. The site prints Wharton’s numbers, which follow those of Theodor Bergk in the fourth edition of his Poetae Lyrici Graeci (Leipzig, 1882). The modern number is Voigt’s, from Eva-Maria Voigt’s Sappho et Alcaeus (Amsterdam, 1971), which kept the numbers of Lobel and Page’s Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955). A reference gives Wharton’s number first and the Voigt number in parentheses, as in the poem that opens “He seems to me equal to the gods”, which is Wharton’s fragment 2 and Voigt’s fragment 31.

A Voigt number is shown only where it is confirmed. Each Wharton fragment’s Greek was compared with the Greek printed under modern numbers on three free sites: the Bibliotheca Augustana, inamidst.com and Poesia Latina. A number is used when two of the three agree, and the quoting author named in Wharton’s note is compared with the sources’ citations. A fragment too short to match, matched by one source only, or numbered differently by the sources carries no modern number. Of Wharton’s 168 entries, 100 have a confirmed number. The concordance page lists each fragment with its number and the agreeing sources.

How the Text Was Checked

The Gutenberg text was divided into 168 records covering fragments 1 to 170, since Wharton prints fragments 7 and 8, 107 and 108, and 122 and 123 as single entries and adds a fragment 57A. Every number is present once, and each of the 121 literal translations is identical to the Gutenberg plain-text edition.

The English was compared word by word with the text layers of two scanned printings: the New York edition of John Lane, 1907, a reprint of the third edition, and the London edition of David Stott, 1887, the second edition. Where both printings differed from the Gutenberg text, the line was read on the page image. Two errors in the Life of Sappho were corrected: “did receive” became “and receive”, and “the names or so many” became “of so many”.

The scans’ text layers cannot read Greek, so each of 508 Greek passages on 123 printed pages was read on the page image of the 1907 printing. A correction was made only when two separate readings agreed with each other and differed from the Gutenberg text; a correction changing letters, as distinct from accents, breathings or punctuation, also needed a third reading. A test passage with one mark altered was placed on each page, and all 112 were detected. The result was 41 corrections, nearly all of accents and breathings, while 17 differences on which the readings disagreed were left as printed. A Greek transcription on Wikisource credited to Wharton’s 1895 edition was not used, because it follows a later editor’s text.

Poems Found Since 1908

Wharton’s edition contains none of the papyrus finds published from 1898 on. Later discoveries include the Berlin parchment, published in 1902; Oxyrhynchus papyri published from 1898 onward, among them those of 1914; a potsherd published in 1937; the Cologne papyrus, published in 2004 and 2005, which completed the poem on old age; and two poems published in 2014. These are noted on the site with the modern translations that include them. The edition adds no commentary or translation of its own.