Frank Hecker

Time for my regularly-scheduled Sunday night poem — or poems in this case. I’m moving up in time to the Romans, and Gaius Valerius Catullus, one of the many later poets who translated Sappho or wrote poems in emulation of hers. Unlike with Sappho, we have almost all of Catullus’s poems, many of which are concerned with his on-again off-again only-partially-requited love for “Lesbia,” the sister of one of Catullus’s fellow Roman aristocrats. This is one of his more famous ones, in a translation by Charles Martin:

Following on from last week’s post, Sappho was not the only lyric poet in ancient Greece. Brooks Haxton has translated a representative selection of Greek lyric poems (including some by Sappho) in his book Dances for Flute and Thunder; here are two contrasting poems, on the life of an old woman and the death of a young boy. (The titles are Haxton’s.)

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”: