Yes, Atthis, you may be sure…
Even in Sardis
Anactoria will think often of us
of the life we shared here, when you seemed
the Goddess incarnate
to her and your singing pleased her best
Now among Lydian women she in her
turn stands first as the red-
fingered moon rising at sunset takes
precedence over stars around her;
her light spreads equally
on the salt sea and fields thick with bloom
Delicious dew pours down to freshen
roses, delicate thyme
and blossoming sweet clover; she wanders
aimlessly, thinking of gentle
Atthis, her heart hanging
heavy with longing in her little breast
She shouts aloud, Come! we know it;
thousand-eared night repeats that cry
across the sea shining between us
[From Sappho: A New Translation, translated by Mary Barnard]
~
From the publisher’s Web site:
These hundred poems and fragments constitute virtually all of Sappho that survives and effectively bring to life the woman whom the Greeks consider to be their greatest lyric poet. Mary Barnard’s translations are lean, incisive, direct—the best ever published. She has rendered the beloved poet’s verses, long the bane of translators, more authentically than anyone else in English.
Mary Barnard (1909–2001) was a prominent American poet, translator, and biographer with many books in her repertoire. She studied Greek at Reed College and began to translate at Ezra Pound’s instigation in the 1930s. Her Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir was published by the University of California Press in 1984. Two years later she received the Western States Book Award for her book-length poem, Time and the White Tigress. She has also published prose fiction and a volume of essays on mythology as well as the original lyrics gathered in Collected Poems, 1979.
From the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Sappho, also spelled (in the Aeolic dialect spoken by the poet) Psappho (born c. 610, Lesbos [now part of Greece]—died c. 570 bc), Greek lyric poet greatly admired in all ages for the beauty of her writing style. She ranks with Archilochus and Alcaeus, among Greek poets, for her ability to impress readers with a lively sense of her personality. Her language contains elements from Aeolic vernacular speech and Aeolic poetic tradition, with traces of epic vocabulary familiar to readers of Homer. Her phrasing is concise, direct, and picturesque. She has the ability to stand aloof and judge critically her own ecstasies and grief, and her emotions lose nothing of their force by being recollected in tranquillity.
Legends about Sappho abound, many having been repeated for centuries. [More here.]