“For there is this to be said for fragmentary survival, that no one can prove
that you didn’t write brilliantly, and an ingenious partisan can make it
apparent that you did. A certain radiance may
invest even the meanest of your remaining shreds, so that when an old
commentator writes
At the porch the most musical and μειλιχσφωγοι (gentle-voiced)
of the girls sang the marriage anthem, which clearly is Sappho’s most delicate
composition,
a word not otherwise notable can become germinally suggestive, a toy for
the imagination. From the tiny part we
are tempted to imagine the whole: a generous exercise if we remember that it is
intended as nothing more conclusive.”
Dudley Fitts: From the
Foreward to Mary Barnard, Sappho, A New Translation, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1958.
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