Name: If Not, Winter
ISBN: 9780375724510

If Not, Winter

A bilingual edition of the work of the Greek poet Sappho, in a new translation by Anne Carson.Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos from about 630 b.c. She was a musical genius who devoted her life to composing and performing songs. Of the nine books of lyrics Sappho is said to have composed, none of the music is extant and only one poem has survived complete. All the rest are fragments. In If Not, Winter Carson presents all of Sappho's fragments in Greek and in English. Brackets and space give the reader a sense of what is absent as well as what is present on the papyrus. Carson's translation illuminates Sappho's reflections on love, desire, marriage, exile, cushions, bees, old age, shame, time, chickpeas and many other aspects of the human situation.From the Hardcover edition.

What Hacker News says

Jun8Dec 2020

Analyzing her "Midnight Poem" is a favorite pastime, there has been attempts by astronomers to pinpoint the date of this night, the latest I know is a paper from 2016 (https://dhayton.haverford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Sap...). From this paper, here's the poem in Ancient Greek and three translations:

    ἐδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
    καὶ πληΐαδες μέσαι δε 
    νύκτες, πα ὰ δ‘ ἔ χετ‘ ὤ α, 
    ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω

    The Moon hath left the sky; 
    Lost is the Pleiads‘ light;
    It is midnight
    And time slips by;
    But on my couch alone I lie. 
    (Symonds, 1873–1876).

    The moon has set, and the Pleiades;
    it is midnight,
    the time is going by, 
    and I sleep alone. 
    (Wharton, 1887: 68).

    The silver moon is set;
    The Pleiades are gone;
    Half the long night is spent, and yet 
    I lie alone.
    (Merivale, 1838: 226).

There has been criticism on the methodology used, e.g. (https://rogueclassicism.com/2016/05/16/problems-with-the-sci...). A good collection of her poems with modern translations is (https://www.amazon.com/If-Not-Winter-Fragments-Sappho/dp/037...)

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telemachosApr 2010

What the hell. Here's my list of literature everyone should at least try (in no particular order):

Homer: both the Iliad and Odyssey

Sophocles: Oedipus the King (read it - far better than you might think)

Plato: The Apology of Socrates

Sappho's fragmentary poems (the translation by Anne Carson titled If not, winter is especially good)

Dante: Inferno

Shakespeare: at least one tragedy, one history, one comedy and one of the final "problem plays"

John Donne: a bunch but if none else Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed

Philip Larkin: he didn't write much; read the complete poems (if nothing else, look at "Born yesterday")

T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Return of the Magi", "Hollow men"

Ernest Hemmingway: A Clean Well-Lighted Place

Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

George Orwell: Any and all of the essays, but especially "Shooting an elephant" and "A hanging"

Stendahl: Red and Black

James Joyce: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

Andre Dumas: The Three Musketeers

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I'll shut up, except to say that although I agree with some of the people on the thread that reading "great books" just because they're considered great is stupid, these books were all a joy. I remember them each pretty happily and return to a few of them now and again and just browse through for awhile. Some "great" books really are great, and if you're reading for yourself (not as a forced assignment), they're often well worth the effort (because, yes, none of them reads like a magazine article).

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