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Talk:Sappho: A New Translation

Latest comment: 7 months ago by UndercoverClassicist in topic GA Review
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GA Review

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Latest comment: 7 months ago42 comments2 people in discussion
Passed. UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:29, 31 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Sappho: A New Translation/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 18:13, 1 February 2024 (UTC)Reply


I'll take a look at this one. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:13, 1 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

There's not much wrong to pick at here -- certainly not much that would cause a problem for GA. A lot of what follows is suggestions to make the article more comprehensive,

Resolved
  • Is there a plausible FUR for an image of the cover in the infobox (as with e.g. Space Invaders)? Could otherwise consider an image of a Sappho papyrus.
    • Book cover is a standard FUR. I hadn't included it because it pushes the poem text down slightly on my screen (and I was too lazy to upload the image!) but technically the GACR do ask for images to be included if possible. I've added an image of the original cover design
  • Non-English terms like Lirici Greci should be in language templates for screen readers and the Wiki software. I'd consider translating them too.
    • Done both
  • Mary Barnard studied Greek while a student at Reed College,: personal taste, perhaps, as to how far to introduce either of these things, but I would at least give dates for Barnard's time at Reed.
  • Henry Thornton Wharton's translation of Sappho: this reads as classicist-ese to me: the works of Sappho vel sim?
    • It reads as unnecessarily wordy to me, but probably better for the average reader so I've adopted it
  • a four-line adaptation of the Ode to Aphrodite.: should Ode to Aphrodite be italicised? It might be worth clarifying that the original is much longer.
    • I think MOS:TITLES counts it as a minor work and it should be in double quotes, which I have done. I've also noted the original 28-line count for Sappho 1
  • Link University of California Press and Sappho 16?
    • Done
  • Barnard's translations render Sappho's poetry in modern language,: modern has a few meanings: I think we mean something more like "contemporary" than simply "modern English" (as opposed to e.g. middle English). Given that the translation is now over half a century old, I'd suggest a phrasing that makes clear it's the vernacular of Barnard's day rather than, necessarily, ours (see WP:ENDURE).
    • I've switched "modern" to "contemporary" - do you think that's better?
      • Definitely better: there's still a little ambiguity (contemporary for her or for us), but it's also much less verbose than e.g. "the vernacular of her time", and that's a virtue too. Certainly a perfectly good solution as far as I'm concerned. UndercoverClassicist T·C 09:58, 3 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
  • Where the surviving Greek text is too fragmentary to fully translate, she gives a conjectured reconstruction, for instance in the fourth and fifth stanzas of Sappho 16: are there any cases in which this was true for Barnard, but is no longer (because we've found more Sappho)? If so, can this be rephrased not to exclude that?
    • On doing some digging I'm not sure there are. The obvious examples where we have found more since Barnard's time are Sappho 5 (included in Edmonds with extensive restoration but entirely omitted from Barnard) and Sappho 58 (discovered the same year Edmonds' edition was published and so omitted by him; Barnard did not include it). I would have thought she would at least have included fr.5, but apparently not.
  • Suggest "three-line tercets" ad "four-line Sapphic stanzas" as an easy helping hand, per MOS:NOFORCELINK.
  • a couplet quoted by Hephaestion: I know what this means (that the poem is only preserved as a couplet, and that couplet is found in the works of Hephaestion), but I don't think many readers without some background in how Greek fragments work will.
    • I've expanded this slightly - do you think it's clearer now? I've been working on Wikipedia's articles on Sappho for so long now that I have to consciously recalibrate my "what do normal people know about this topic?" senses occasionally... (I also glossed Hephaestion, which should satisfy your continued need to prod me into occasionally remembering that MOS:NOFORCELINK exists!)
  • In his review of Sappho: it feels odd to abbreviate here when we have written it out in full so many times before. Could do "in his review of Barnard's work, Burton Raffel described it as..."
  • Similarly, The classicist and translator Guy Davenport called Barnard's Sappho: could be called it.
    • Adopted both of these suggestions
  • Is there any room for "the principle of a balanced line" (Christy 33-34, citing B's memoir) as part of her prosody?
    • Added a paragraph on this based on Barnsley's biography, which I found explained what what going on there better
  • More Christy: B's arrangement of some of the poems of Part 1 following the course of a day (p. 36) could do with a mention, as could perhaps something about how she arranged the poems in quite a different way to the conventional numeration.
    • And added
  • It does seem that Barnard added quite a lot, not just to fill fragments: see the extra opening line she added to frag. 123, or to frag. 16 (Christy p. 37)
    • She added "titles" to all of the fragments; we do mention this very briefly but I will see if anything more can be said
      • Ah: I hadn't quite parsed "To an army wife, in Sardis" as a title. certainly, in at least some cases, these seem to be a bit more than just titles: look at Barnard's poem 9:

        Although they are

        Only breath, words
        which I command
        are immortal

        . From flicking around on the internet, there seems to be a little doubt as to where Barnard got that precise wording from, and even whether it's really a translation as such: see this reddit thread which, while not itself citable, does raise some issues which probably deserve poking into. Luckily, the commenters left a good bibliographic trail. UndercoverClassicist T·C 11:19, 3 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
        • Goff & Harloe describe them as titles in the Cambridge Companion to Sappho, as does Bruce Whiteman in his review article on English translations of Sappho. Modern editions print them in all-caps to distinguish them from the text of the poem, though judging by the versions of Barnard on archive.org that's a new development.
  • Why no page numbers for the Classical Outlook review? I did try to find out how RM might have been, but no success.
    • An oversight, I presume. I was also unable to figure out who RM was unfortunately
  • More recent critics have praised Barnard's use of meter: suggest of free verse, as most readers will take meter to mean regular meter: this does then require a slight rephrase later on to avoid repetition.
    • I see the possibility for confusion, but I can't come up with an alternative phrasing I'm happy with – perhaps I'm too close to the text! I'm open to suggestions on this point, but given the context of the paragraph I should hope that it's clear enough.
  • the old-fashioned diction preferred by previous translators: a thought: are we talking here about translators who used consciously archaic diction, or simply translators who wrote a long time ago? I wonder if we could be more specific than old-fashioned if the former. UndercoverClassicist T·C 11:26, 3 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
    • Both, I think, though the source is not explicit. Wharton's edition was from the 1880s, so it was long-outdated by the time Barnard got her hands on it, but even Lattimore's 1955 translation would not have looked far out of place in Wharton:

      Throned in splendor, deathless, O Aphrodite,
      child of Zeus, charm-fashioner, I entreat you
      not with griefs, and bitterness to break my
      Spirit, O goddess
  • "Sappho would never sell" is this a direct quotation? Surely they would have said "Sappho will never sell"? Christy seems to suggest that it's Barnard's words; this should be clarified.
    • Hm, Barnsley quotes this as though it's the words of Anchor Books directly, but checking Assault on Mt. Helicon it is clear that Barnard is paraphrasing. It's a shame because it's a nice ironic quote but I've reworked it.
  • The choice to translate Sappho into free verse rather than attempting a metrical imitation has been followed by many subsequent translators: can we give any examples?
    • Depending on how strict you want to be with WP:SYNTH, I'd argue that it's enough to find a source showing that e.g. Carson is in free verse (and surely almost any review will do so?) -- to really cement that, we could soften "followed" to something more like "has also been a feature of...", which would take away the need to prove that they used free verse in conscious imitation of Barnard. However, I wonder if any translators' prefaces to their works would be fruitful -- it's fairly common to talk there about where you've followed/deviated from predecessors? UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:38, 6 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
      • find a source showing that e.g. Carson is in free verse (and surely almost any review will do so?) frustratingly not that I have found. I will keep digging. However, Balmer 2013 (p.73) cites Barnard as an inspiration (but doesn't mention metre) and Whiteman 2014 cites Bruce Davenport and Jim Powell's translations as being part of the same poetic lineage as Barnard, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams; there's something to add there. (But it's too late for that tonight, so over the weekend...)
  • The classicist and translator Guy Davenport: this seems to be an exception to your usual practice: as you might remember, I'm generally in favour of these short introductions, but any reason to do it specifically and only for Davenport?
  • There's some interesting stuff in Christy 1994, p. 29, about why a new Sappho translation was called for, and about Pound's reaction to Barnard's initial work. I also quite like her comments in the little poem "Static". As this is a very short article, perhaps there's room to include some of the above?


Image review

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No images to review, although the long poem translation does the job (perhaps a whole poem is skirting the line as to fair use, but I wouldn't push on this point).

Yes, an entire longish poem might be toeing the line somewhat, but it's one poem out of 100, and it is surely Barnard's most quoted (and the one referred to most in the article). We could have only the first two stanzas, I suppose, equating to the first stanza of the original Greek, but then readers familiar with poem 16 miss seeing Barnard's divergence from the known text which is I think the interesting part. And if a shorter poem, there's no obvious candidate for which. To me it's much more justifiably relevant than the standard book cover image in articles on books.

Spot checks

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  • Note 4 (Gordon 1994) checks out.
  • Note 12b: checks
  • Note 16 (Reed College 2001): checks (though probably not the best source for publication figures?)
  • Note 19: R.M. 1960: checks, but see above re. page numbers.
  • Note 22 (Raffel 1965): checks
  • I am not immediately seeing support for 12a (Where the surviving Greek text is too fragmentary to fully translate, she gives a conjectured reconstruction, for instance in the fourth and fifth stanzas of Sappho 16.: Englert seems to be talking specifically about Sappho 16 here, rather than making a general point with 16 as an example, as we do in the article.
    • added a cite to Prins, who makes a more general point about Barnard's habit of "fill[ing] in textual gaps"

That makes the source review/spot-check a pass. UndercoverClassicist T·C 07:29, 20 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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