The Tenth Muse

The Poetry of Sappho, translated by Jim Powell. Oxford University Press, 2019, $15.95 paper.

THE ABBREVIATION lac., in the laconic shorthand of a textual scholar, indicates a lacuna, or a hole in the received text. Like death’s heads, or stone lions flanking a locked door, the letters are posted before and behind nearly all of the shredded poetic corpus that bears the name of Sappho. Precious little survives: bits of papyrus, shards of inscribed pottery, a few quotations in later authors. All told, about 650 lines of Greek have been, in one way or another, tied to her over the centuries, though the vast majority resemble poetry the way chimp typewritings generally do Hamlet. One poem, a hymn to Aphrodite, is complete; the remaining lines can be grouped into a couple hundred fragments.

If her work leaves much to the imagination, what we know of the poet herself consists of little else. In the ancient world Sappho was famous; her poems were widely disseminated by word of mouth, written down, and eventually compiled in collections (none of which survive). Yet facts about Sappho’s life fall somewhere between the hypothetical and the wishful, usually reflecting the preoccupations of the wishers: what she looked like; whether she was married; the names of her mother and father; her politics; her much-discussed sexual preferences; how many poems she wrote. One third-century BC inscription records that she and her family were exiled to