I must say in the first place I didn't intend to put these poems here. When some months ago I began to read a book on the history of Literature, I knew I was going first to be presented the works of Homer, some parts of his Iliad and Odyssey I read and certainly enjoyed. I also knew Hesiod, if you want, and Solon of Athens. What I hadn't expected was this:
Sleep, darling
I have a small
daughter called
Cleis, who is
like a golden
flower
I wouldn't take
all Croesus'
kingdom with love
thrown in, for her....
I had just been touched, that very instant I read it touched in my heart by hers, as if those 2600 years elapsed between the moment she wrote it and the moment I read it would have shrunk to the point of having us synchronized. I felt through her she was there loving her daughter and her love was mine and my emotion was hers. I didn't need looking into my book to learn she was the most conspicuous among the first lyric poets.
Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos in the 7th century BC. We don't know very much about her life. What is important to have in mind when reading her poems, in order to fully understand them, is that 'the fragmentary remains of Sappho's poems indicate that she taught her art to a group of young women, to whom she was devotedly attached and whose bridal odes she composed when they left her to be married' (cited from the Encarta 97 Encyclopedia). A prominent example is this:
He seems to me the equal of the gods,
the man who sits facing you
and, near you, listens to
your charming voice
and your alluring laugh that makes
my heart flutter in my breast.
When I see you, even briefly, then
I cannot speak,
but my tongue is silenced; a slender
flame slips suddenly beneath my flesh;
my eyes see nothing, my ears
are roaring,
sweat drenches me, trembling
seizes my entire body, I am paler
than grass, and I seem almost dead.
But I must endure, since....
Unfortunately, most of Sappho's poems are lost. What it remains, we have it either by the citations found in ancient grammar books (the grammarians put parts of the poems as an example of a particular use of the language) or because they were in the back of some reused papyri, mainly found in Egypt (imagine that you need a bit of paper to write down the shopping list you carelessly take an old one from the bottom of your drawer, only to know 2000 years later that you've written in the back of a Shakespeare's original sonnet's manuscript). Don't get surprised, then, of the differences between versions of these poems, or between the text in English and the one in Catalan.
The poems in English I've taken them from the Internet, mainly from http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/Poetry/Sappho/http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Class/his374/Sapptran.html, http://cac.psu.edu/~ltv100/Classics/Poetry/sappho.html, and http://www.earthlight.co.nz/users/spock/sappho.html.
Most of translations are by Barnard and Myatt.
The Catalan translations come from Manuel Balasch (Safo: Obra completa. Edicions 62, 1985. ISBN 84-297-0875-8), and please accept my suggestion: buy the book. Balasch's translations are simply beautiful, and are presented face to face with the original Greek. Furthermore, both the foreword and the footnotes are insightful.
In the poems, four (or five, excuse the typographical inconsistency) dots (....) indicates a break in the fragment. Either square brackets or italics indicates a conjecture.
Hope you enjoy these poems.
When the sun dazzles the earth
Deathless Aphrodite Daughter of Zeus and maker of snares
For some it is horsemen; for others it is infantry
Gather your [ lyre ] and sing for me
I can reveal to you that I wished to die