Sappho: A New Translation

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, Barnard 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 her translation, completing it in 1953; it was published in 1958.[4]

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.[5] Barnard's translation is based on the Greek text of Edmonds' Loeb edition.[6] She groups the poems into six sections,[7] which she arranges to give a narrative of Sappho's life from youth to old age.[8]

Barnard's translations render Sappho's poetry in modern language, in contrast to the old-fashioned diction preferred by previous translators.[9] 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.[10] The poems are given titles,[11] and translated in free verse.[12] She does not always retain the stanzaic structure of Sappho's poems: she often uses tercets where Sappho's poems are in Sapphic stanzas,[11] while for Sappho 130 she divides a couplet quoted by Hephaestion over six lines and three stanzas.[10]

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"[13] – the translation had sold 100,000 copies by 1994[14] and as of 2013 had been continuously in print with the University of California Press for 55 years.[15]

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,[16][6] while the reviewer in The Classical Outlook suggested that the translations would have been more memorable had they been in rhyming verse.[17] Barnard's choice to translate Sappho into free verse rather than attempting a metrical imitation has been followed by many subsequent translators.[18]

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".[19] In a 1994 review, Lorrie Goldensohn said that it was still one of the best English translations of Sappho.[20] Barnard's translation is particularly influential in the US, where according to Josephine Balmer it is "iconic".[21]

• Balmer, Josephine (2013). Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry. Oxford University Press.
• Barnard, Mary (1958). Sappho: A New Translation. University of California Press.
• Barnsley, Sarah (2013). "Making It New: Sappho, Mary Barnard and American Modernism". Synthesis. 5.
• Christy, Angela (1994). "The Mary Barnard Translation of Sappho". Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. 23 (1). JSTOR 24726068.
• Donahue, Bill (1 September 2009). "Channelling Sappho". Reed Magazine.
• Englert, Walter (2 August 1999). "The Words She Commands: Translating Sappho From the Heart". Reed Magazine.
• Goff, Barbara; Harloe, Katherine (2021). "Sappho in the 20th Century and Beyond". In Finglass, P. J.; Kelly, Adrian (eds.). 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). JSTOR 24726067.
• Gordon, David (1994). "Ezra Pound to Mary Barnard: An ABC of Metrics". Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. 23 (1). JSTOR 24726075.
• Grover, Emma (29 October 2017). "Finding Sappho: Four Translations in Conversation". The Stanford Daily. Retrieved 4 July 2023.
• Mercier, Vivian (1959). "Ovid and Sappho in Translation". Poetry. 95 (3). JSTOR 20587720.
• 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 (ed.). Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission. University of California Press.
• Raffel, Burton (1965). "Mary Barnard's Sappho". The Hudson Review. 18 (2). JSTOR 3848520.
• "Her translation turned Sappho into a modernist icon: Mary Ethel Barnard '32". Reed Magazine. November 2001.
• R. M. (1960). "[Review] Sappho: A New Translation". The Classical Outlook. 38 (3). JSTOR 43929668.
• Stanford, W. B. (1958). "[Review] Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics and Sappho: A New Translation". Hermathena. 92. JSTOR 23039119.