Review of If not, Winter, Fragments of Sappho Translated by Anne Carson

October 17, 2010

Ripped, torn, shredded papyri, quotations on pottery shards and in the text of historical writers are all that remain of Sappho’s lyrical poetry. The papyri on which she wrote has been lost, destroyed, or corrupted beyond recognition. The library of Alexandria once held nine of her books. Of course, we all know what happened to that library. Out of this oeuvre, we possess only one of those books, containing only forty, decipherable poems.

The personage of Sappho has been a subject of much dispute over the centuries. Little is known about the actual life of Sappho. Her poetry is the only definitive source for a woman bearing that epithet. As Page Dubois observes in her introduction to Sappho Burning, “She is not a person, not even a character in a drama or a fiction, but a set of texts gathered in her name” (Dubois 3). Sappho as real historical figure remains an enigma and will probably always remain so. This, of course, does not stop many from trying to construct a biography of the poet. These biographies tend to be charged with the beliefs and ideals of the biographer, a practice more in reflexivity. Sappho’s sexuality, for example, is the ground of most contention. Popular consensus has cast Sappho as a lesbian. But there are countless “fictions” arguing for or against Sappho’s same-sex practices. These scholars may, in their construction of Sappho’s life, emphasize particular aspects of their [own] society, culture, and sexuality. The interesting result is that it is often difficult to engage Sappho in situ. Sappho scholarship thus has much diversity, extending into the “meta-“ sphere.

Sappho’s fragments mark a unique body among fragments historically. These are actual fragments, and they are studied for their literary merit maybe more or just as much as for their historical content. If we compare those of the Romantic poets, like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Bryon’s Don Juan, or Keats’s Hyperion poems, we find, for example, that Coleridge deliberately composed “Kubla Khan” as a fragment; Byron’s and Keats’s poems remain abandoned or incomplete at death. Sappho, by contrast, finished her poems. In the world of literature, you’d be hard pressed to find another work situationally similar. Fragments (with a capital F) often fall under the domain of historians. But Sappho has always held a special seat for us literary types as the “tenth muse.”

Unlike past translators like Mary Bernard and Page Dubois, Ann Carson attempts to preserve all of Sappho’s fragments in their broken form. In her translation titled, If Not, Winter, she translates even the most fragmented poems, using brackets to indicate the lost parts of the poems. She explains, “when translating texts read from papyri, I have used a single square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that ] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line” (Carson xi). Carson makes a conscious effort to represent to the everyday reader the image of the actual fragment in the pages of her book. These symbols are not just a testament to endurance, but a fully functional literary device. Carson wants us to consider that sense of absence while reading Sappho and notes that these brackets “are exciting” and “imply a free space of imaginal adventure,” to find new meaning in the interplay between symbol and word (Carson xi). For Carson, the bracket is a necessary element of the poem: it should not, cannot be separated when one reads this translation.

Carson’s brackets are like musical markings, like musical rests. This approach calls attention to an important turning point in human history: the break between performance and record, a transition from the mode of performative art to written word. After all, Sappho’s poetry are at its core lyrics. Sappho herself sat at the cusp of that transition. To observe Carson’s brackets is to acquire a kind of creative license, acknowledging the potential for the reader to give new life (a much abused praise, but I think apt here), returning the performative power to a misaligned body of work. Carson’s translation is as much a gesture for readerly performance as it is a commentary about the discipline of translation.