If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
|
I picked this book fresh in paperback last
August, and squirrel-like, I’ve hoarded it, tucked between cheek and gum, awaiting the proper season to crack it open. The mention of winter in the title signaled to me recently that its time had come. Its contents – already two and a half millennia old – aren’t a bit stale. Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson is probably best known for her original works, (like the verse novel The Autobiography of Red, which tells a strange and wonderful fable about the life of a monstrous young man), but she’s also gaining a reputation for brilliant modern translations of drama and poetry from ancient Greece. If Not, Winter is a collection of all the existing poems and fragments written by the famous Sappho, one of the greatest poets of the ancient world. Where Homer’s sprawling poetry tells epic stories and would have been rhythmically chanted, Sappho’s domain was the lyric poem: brief lines sung to musical accompaniment, a classy precursor to today’s radio fare. Sappho’s poetic net is smaller in scope, but it is the perfect instrument for catching the splendid moment; with each short poem she grasps a figure, a face, an immortal instant of grief or delight. Whether describing the heady rush of love ("Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees"), or commemorating a friend’s wedding by comparing the bridegroom to a slender sapling, her words – brought to us by Carson’s own arresting talents – call a halt to the spinning day. For an instant, she makes us feel the sharp beauty of the world. The strange joys of "If Not, Winter" are only heightened by its incompleteness. Few of the poems have survived intact; most are broken into fragments, some beyond sense. Many of its pages are riddled with blank white spaces, like a volume of ancient Mad Libs or a set of magnetic Greek Poetry tiles. The result enlists the reader as a participant, an accomplice poet – with both Sappho and Carson – seeking to catch the moment. Review by Mark Bradshaw, January 22, 2004
|