Translations

Choosing a Translation

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English translations of Sappho differ in three ways: the form they give the poems, the number of fragments they include, and the date at which their text was fixed. Sappho’s poems survive as quotations in later writers and as damaged ancient copies, and each new papyrus find has altered what a translator can include.

The books are listed with their translators, publishers and years. Public-domain versions available at no cost are listed alongside the books in print.

Public-domain translations

Several older translations are in the public domain. John Myers O’Hara’s The Poems of Sappho: An Interpretative Rendition into English (Portland, 1910) is available as Project Gutenberg eBook #42166. H. De Vere Stacpoole’s Sappho: A New Rendering (London, Hutchinson, 1920) is Project Gutenberg eBook #42543, and Bliss Carman’s Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (1904 on the Gutenberg record, 1907 on the title page) is eBook #12389.

The O’Hara and Stacpoole books are verse renderings. Stacpoole’s contains the Hymn to Aphrodite, the Ode to Anactoria, fifty further fragments, and Ovid’s Heroides 15, “Sappho to Phaon.” In the introduction to Carman’s book, C. G. D. Roberts describes Carman’s undertaking as not one of translation or paraphrase but of “imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction”. The 1925 edition of The Poems of Sappho with a foreword signed E. M. G. prints the Greek text, a literal prose translation, a metrical version and notes.

Why editions differ

Selections leave poems out, as Barnard’s and Barnstone’s volumes do. Even books aiming at completeness stop at the date of their writing, so an older edition prints shorter versions of poems later completed by new finds. Numbering also differs: H. T. Wharton’s edition follows Bergk’s numbers, J. M. Edmonds’s Loeb volume has its own, and modern books commonly follow Voigt’s.

The Translations

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho — Sappho

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho — trans. Anne Carson (2003)

Sappho · Vintage Books

For: General readers
Form: Verse translation with Greek on facing pages

Anne Carson’s translation of the fragments sets the Greek and English on facing pages and uses brackets to mark gaps in the papyrus texts.

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Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works — Sappho

Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works — trans. Diane Rayor and André Lardinois (2014)

Sappho · Cambridge University Press

For: General readers
Form: Complete verse translation with introduction and commentary notes

Diane Rayor’s translations are accompanied by an introduction and notes by André Lardinois, and the volume includes the poems found in the Cologne and Brothers Poems papyri.

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Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation — Sappho

Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation — trans. Henry Thornton Wharton (1885)

Sappho · RavensEdge Publishing (free edition)

For: General readers
Form: Literal prose translation, with Wharton’s notes, the verse renderings he collected, and the Greek

Henry Thornton Wharton’s literal prose translation of the fragments known before 1898 (fifth edition, 1908), with his notes on where each fragment survives, the verse renderings he collected, the Greek, and the modern (Voigt) number where it is confirmed. It does not include the poems found on papyrus since 1898.

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