Sappho

Called the "Tenth Muse" by the ancients, Greece's greatest female lyric poet Sappho (ca. 610-580 B.C.E.) spent the majority of her life on the famed island of Lesbos. Passionate and breathtaking, her poems survive only in fragments, following religious conspiracies to silence her. This excellent translation includes Roche's brilliant essay, "Portrait of Sappho."

It's a powerful combination of the world's best literature and superior reading and skills instruction. "Prentice Hall Literature Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes" helps students grasp the power and beauty that lies within the written word, while the program's research-based reading approach ensures that no child is left behind.

Little remains today of the writings of the archaic Greek poet Sappho (fl. late 7th and early 6th centuries B.C.E.), whose work is said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry--among them, poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance--that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. Stanley Lombardo's translations give us a virtuoso embodiment of Sappho's voice, whose telltale charm, authority, immediacy, directness, intensity, and sudden changes of tone are among the hallmarks of his masterly translation. Pamela Gordon introduces us to the world of Sappho, discusses questions surrounding the transmission of her manuscripts, offers advice on reading these texts, and concludes with an enlightening discussion of same-sex desire in Sappho.

Oxford Papyrology (2022). P.Oxy. XXI 2289. Sappho, Book i. University of Oxford. Online resource.

Offers a new translation of the approximately one-twelfth of Sappho's total writing that has survived to the present, and includes brief essays on her life, writing style, and work.