Translating Sappho

Sappho’s poems reach English readers through renderings that differ in form as well as in wording. The public-domain versions fall into three groups: literal prose that follows the Greek phrase by phrase, rhymed English verse, and unrhymed English stanzas modeled on the Sapphic stanza. John Dryden’s three heads of translation, set out in 1680, offer a separate scale, which measures how closely a version keeps to its original.

Fragment 2 (Voigt 31), the poem that begins “That man seems to me peer of gods” in the prose rendering, appears here in four public-domain versions, one for each way of rendering it and two for rhymed verse.

Three Ways of Rendering Sappho

Sappho’s Greek does not rhyme. Greek verse was measured by patterns of long and short syllables, and many of her poems use the stanza that bears her name: three long lines followed by a shorter fourth. English translators have answered that form in three ways.

Literal prose gives the meaning in order, with no attempt at verse. Rhymed verse sets the sense in English rhyme and meter. A third group writes four-line stanzas in the shape of the Sapphic stanza, and leaves them unrhymed. The grouping describes the surviving versions and is not a scheme found in the sources themselves.

Literal Prose

The literal prose rendering of fragment 2 (Voigt 31) in Henry Thornton Wharton’s Sappho begins: “That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter” (Wharton). The sentence keeps the order of the Greek clauses and carries no meter or rhyme.

A 1925 edition titled The Poems of Sappho uses prose as one step in a fixed sequence. Its foreword states that the plan was to print first the Greek text, then the literal or prose translation, then a metrical version “adhering as nearly as possible to the meaning of the Greek,” and finally notes and commentary. The same foreword says that some fragments are so short and defective that they are “insusceptible of anything but a literal rendering.”

John Malcolm Edmonds’s Lyra Graeca, volume 1 (Loeb Classical Library, 1922), prints the Greek text with a facing English prose translation.

Rhymed Verse

Rhymed versions of the same poem appear in English from the early eighteenth century. Ambrose Philips published one in 1711, which opens: “Blest as the immortal gods is he, / The youth who fondly sits by thee.” H. De Vere Stacpoole’s Sappho: A New Rendering gives another, which opens: “That man, whoever he may be, / Who sits awhile to gaze on thee.” In both, the first two lines rhyme as a couplet.

Stacpoole’s volume is titled on its contents page as The Hymn to Aphrodite and Fifty-Two Fragments, together with Sappho to Phaon, Ovid’s Heroic Epistle XV, and its second item is headed “Ode to Anactoria.”

The Sapphic Stanza in English

John Myers O’Hara’s The Poems of Sappho: An Interpretative Rendition into English (Portland, 1910) opens with a group of poems headed Sapphics. It renders fragment 2 (Voigt 31) under the title Ode to Anactoria in four-line stanzas of three long lines and a short fourth, without rhyme: “Peer of Gods to me is the man thy presence / Crowns with joy; who hears, as he sits beside thee, / Accents sweet of thy lips the silence breaking, / With lovely laughter.”

A different venture is Bliss Carman’s Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics. In his introduction to it, Charles G. D. Roberts writes that the task is “not one of translation or of paraphrasing, but of imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction,” and describes Carman’s method as “to imagine each lost lyric as discovered, and then to translate it.”

Dryden’s Three Heads

The English poet John Dryden divided all translation into three kinds in his preface to the translation of Ovid’s Epistles (1680). That collection includes the verse letter of Sappho to Phaon. The preface is printed in W. P. Ker’s Essays of John Dryden (Oxford, 1900). Dryden writes: “All translation, I suppose, may be reduced to these three heads. First, that of metaphrase, or turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another…”

He continues: “The second way is that of paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense…” And: “The third way is that of imitation, where the translator (if now he has lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion.”

Dryden’s terms measure how closely a version follows its original. The three forms above describe the shape of the English. Prose, rhymed verse and unrhymed stanzas can each stand at different distances from the Greek. The Latin poet Catullus’s poem 51, an adaptation of the same fragment, belongs to the ancient tradition of imitation.

Fragment 2 (Voigt 31) in Four Public-Domain Versions

Fragment 2 (Voigt 31) is quoted in the treatise On the Sublime, a work of literary criticism, as an example of style. The four versions below open with the same clause.