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sauvageloup's review against another edition
lighthearted
reflective
3.5
bit difficult to give a star rating on the quality of it, so i've just given one marking my enjoyment
Pros:
- some very beautiful turns of phrase, and the translation (from my ignorant POV) seemed good
- intrigued me enough to want to look stuff up and wish that i'd studied it at school or uni
- some of the fragments did alight my imagination as I wondered about the ambiguities and the layers meanings that seemed to be there.
- reading the notes and looking things up helped me learn a couple things
cons:
- very sparse and not much quantity (with the additions of all the ambiguity of meaning and translation), so it's hard to judge whether i like her work or not. after all the hype over the years, bit disappointing
- many fragments did feel too bare, too prosaic, though I'm sure there's an art to making it seem natural, as is stated in the translator's comments. a lot of them, i didn't really want to hover over as they didn't much strike me.
(- after all the talk about Sappho being a famous lesbian, it seemed very much to me as if she were more likely to be bi or pan?)
so too high expectations probably ruined it a bit for me, but i would like to revisit them, perhaps with more research and context.
Pros:
- some very beautiful turns of phrase, and the translation (from my ignorant POV) seemed good
- intrigued me enough to want to look stuff up and wish that i'd studied it at school or uni
- some of the fragments did alight my imagination as I wondered about the ambiguities and the layers meanings that seemed to be there.
- reading the notes and looking things up helped me learn a couple things
cons:
- very sparse and not much quantity (with the additions of all the ambiguity of meaning and translation), so it's hard to judge whether i like her work or not. after all the hype over the years, bit disappointing
- many fragments did feel too bare, too prosaic, though I'm sure there's an art to making it seem natural, as is stated in the translator's comments. a lot of them, i didn't really want to hover over as they didn't much strike me.
(- after all the talk about Sappho being a famous lesbian, it seemed very much to me as if she were more likely to be bi or pan?)
so too high expectations probably ruined it a bit for me, but i would like to revisit them, perhaps with more research and context.
Content Warnings
Minor: Death, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, and Grief
mentions of loss of virginity and pain or regret afterwards.