A Study Guide for Sappho's "To an Army Wife in Sardis"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Sappho's "To an Army Wife in Sardis," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535841207

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11

Fragment 16

Sappho

C. 580 BCE

Introduction

Sappho is one of the greatest poets ever to write, and she is the earliest female writer of whom history has any knowledge. Coming at the very beginning of the Western literary tradition, Sappho's influence is impossible to overestimate. She is the kind of poet that other great poets, from her contemporary Alcaeus to the American Ezra Pound, claim as their favorite poet. The philosopher Plato called her the tenth Muse. Her works are uniquely clear, simple, and compelling in their beauty. Nevertheless, Sappho's poems are known only from quotations by other authors in antiquity or through damaged manuscripts found by archaeologists in Egypt a century ago. For this reason, there exist only two complete poems; but fragment 16 is almost complete, and its full sense can be rendered in translation. The main theme of almost all Sappho's poetry is the universal human experience of love. Fragment 16 concerns the destructive power of desire that can drive its victims to acts of violence and madness, suggesting that the frenzy of warfare is the only thing that can be compared to love.

Sappho's works were translated into English in 1958 by Pound's disciple Mary Barnard. Since then, her translation has become the most popular version of Sappho's work, and it is the source of much information about Sappho. Barnard titled her translation of this fragment To an Army Wife in Sardis, despite the fact that it is addressed only to the reader, does not explicitly concern anyone married to a soldier, and does not mention Sardis. The construction of that title seems to collapse together several ideas from the poem into a new orientation that Sappho herself may never have envisioned. Included here are a prose-poem translation by David M. Campbell and a five-stanza verse translation by Aaron Poochigian, given the similar title To an Army Wife (Troy).

Author Biography

There are two sources of information about the life of Sappho: