Frank Hecker

It’s time for another Sunday night poem. Continuing our Greek theme, tonight we have a poem by Sappho of Lesbos. Given that Sappho was universally acknowledged by later Greek and Roman writers as one of the greatest poets of antiquity, it’s extremely frustrating that her work has survived only in fragments. Imagine if all we had of Shakespeare’s plays were a few soliloquies and other brief passages quoted by others, with the plays themselves lost to time, decayed or (worse) deliberately destroyed.

But here’s an almost complete poem, probably Sappho’s most famous and most frequently translated, in a free translation by Mary Barnard, from 1958; Sappho is envying the guy who’s sitting next to her crush:

After Gilgamesh last time, this Sunday night I move forward in time several centuries and include a poem about the Trojan war — not the Iliad, which I’ve already written about, but a modern poem, Louis Glück’s “The Triumph of Achilles”:

Last year in my favorite discord I made a series of Sunday night posts, each highlighting a poet and poem that I enjoyed reading. I can’t speak for anyone else who read those, but I personally thought it was a fun thing to do, and it rekindled a habit of poetry-reading that I had let lapse. So I’m reviving and expanding the series here, following my prior scheme of moving through history (not always strictly chronologically) and presenting to you a taste of my favorites.

This Sunday's poem is one of the earliest known, the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are a lot of translations available, including a critical edition by Andrew George and a relatively straightforward translation by Stephen Mitchell. However my favorite is David Ferry’s “new rendering in English verse.” It is often far from literal, and takes multiple liberties with the (sometimes fragmented) text, but I agree with William Moran’s introduction that Ferry has “communicated to us some sense of the beauty of the original, and some sense of the emotions that reading or hearing the original must have aroused.”

Here is the beginning: