Volume 6, Number 3 · March 3, 1966
Prima Donna
By D.S. Carne-Ross
Sappho: Lyrics in the Original Greek with Translations
by Willis Barnstone
Doubleday (Anchor Books), 208 pp., $1.25
Sappho: Poems and Fragments
translated, with an Introduction, by Guy Davenport
Michigan, 140 pp., $3.95
At Covent Garden there used to be (perhaps there still are) two kinds of performance. There were the smart evenings when the opera was sung in the original language by a strong cast sprinkled with distinguished visitors. And there were the dowdy evenings when the resident second eleven sang in English to an audience which spent Act III looking at its watch to make sure of catching the last bus home. Something of the same atmospheric difference distinguishes the Greeks in Greek from the Greeks in translation. When one first stumbled ignorantly through the remains of Sappho there was, even before the aesthetic shock ('Can it really be as good as this?'), the snobbish first-night thing: 'Am I really reading Sappho in the original?' There one sat, in the stalls, with Ben Johnson and Socrates and Swinburne and Professor Wilamowitz, as the prima donna of poetry lifted up her faultless head. In translation this glamor goes. No doubt it is improving to encounter, even at several snarled removes, the first lyric poet of the West, yet one can hardly not be conscious that one's betters had a much braver time of it the night before.
Review, 1914 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |