Show description

Sappho did not title her poems. I have made use of the “free line,” which is a poem’s title, in order to give the reader information found in the source and commentary, or derived from a close study of a difficult or evasive fragment. A simple example: In the one­line fragment 54, the subject noun of the verb is missing in the Greek text. It Introduction xli reads: “. . ” How­ ever, the lexicographer Pollux, in whose Vocabulary this line is cited and thereby preserved, states that Sappho is describing Eros.

Not on McCulloh’s watch, for which I am endlessly grateful. In general I prefer to be closer to what Italians do with Cicero and Greeks with Euripides. They pronounce all common words and ancient names as they do Italian and modern Greek and do not aspirate their ϕ. Hence, Greeks sitting in an ancient amphi­ theater or standing in an Orthodox church understand the old chanted Greek. Whatever script is used to record Sappho in another tongue, as she sings in Greek she must sing in English. The smallest of her surviving Greek fragments echoes with music.

On the third and last day of his famous trial of “gross indecency” for a homosexual act in 1895, Wilde invoked the Sonnets in his defense, a declaration that served to deepen his legal guilt. In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the editor, Katherine Duncan­ Jones, addresses the almost universal dissemblance of Shake­ speare’s homosexual passions. Without sympathy she describes W. H. ” She writes: This is the case of W. H. Auden. Though anyone with a knowledge of Auden’s biography might ex­ pect him to celebrate and endorse the homoerotic character of 1–126, he was absolutely determined not to do so, at least publicly.