Sappho's Lyre

Sappho's Lyre
Author: Diane J. Rayor
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1991-08-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780520910966

Sappho sang her poetry to the accompaniment of the lyre on the Greek island of Lesbos over 2500 years ago. Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets—the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time. Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including "new" Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers. Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.

Sappho's Lyre

Sappho's Lyre
Author: Diane J. Rayor
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520073357

"The translations are excellent--at once literal, graceful, and idiomatic--and the poems have been selected in a way that is unparalleled in any comparable collection and is responsive to contemporary concerns."--Sheila Murnaghan, author of Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey "As English poems in their own right, and as honest and sensitive transpositions of the Greek songs, these works surpass any translations of the archaic lyrists that I have seen."--John Herington, author of Poetry into Drama

The Woman and the Lyre

The Woman and the Lyre
Author: Jane M Snyder
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2017-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0809335964

Faint though the voices of the women of Greek and Roman antiquity may be in some cases, their sound, if we listen carefully enough, can fill many of the gaps and silences of women s past.From the beginning with Sappho in the seventh century B.C. and ending with Hypatia and Egeria in the fifth century A.D., Jane McIntosh Snyder listens carefully to the major women writers of classical Greece and Rome, piecing together the surviving fragments of their works into a coherent analysis that places them in their literary, historical, and intellectual contexts.While relying heavily on modern classical scholarship, Snyder refutes some of the arguments that implicitly deny the power of women's written words the idea that women's experience is narrow or trivial and therefore automatically inferior as subject matter for literature, the notion that intensity in a woman is a sign of neurotic imbalance, and the assumption that women s work should be judged according to some externally imposed standard.The author studies the available fragments of Sappho, ranging from poems on mythological themes to traditional wedding songs and love poems, and demonstrates her considerable influence on Western thought and literature. An overview of all of the authors Snyder discusses shows that ancient women writers focused on such things as emotions, lovers, friendship, folk motifs, various aspects of daily living, children, and pets, in distinct contrast to their male contemporaries concern with wars and politics. Straightforwardness and simplicity are common characteristics of the writers Snyder examines. These women did not display allusion, indirection, punning and elaborate rhetorical figures to the extent that many male writers of the ancient world did. Working with the sparse records available, Snyder strives to place these female writers in their proper place in our heritage.

Poems and Fragments

Poems and Fragments
Author: Sappho
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780872205918

Presents a Sappho by a poet and translator that treats the fragments as aesthetic wholes, complete in their fragmentariness, and which is also, as the translator puts it: 'ever mindful of performative qualities, quality of voice, changes of voice...'

A Companion to the Greek Lyric Poets

A Companion to the Greek Lyric Poets
Author: Douglas E. Gerber
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789004099449

This handbook is a guide to the reading of elegiac, iambic, personal and public poetry of early Greece. Intended as a teaching manual or as an aid for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, it presents the major scholarly debates affecting the reading of these poetic texts, such as the effect of genre, the question of the poetic persona, or the impact of modern literary theory.

Victorian Sappho

Victorian Sappho
Author: Yopie Prins
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2020-12-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691222150

What is Sappho, except a name? Although the Greek archaic lyrics attributed to Sappho of Lesbos survive only in fragments, she has been invoked for many centuries as the original woman poet, singing at the origins of a Western lyric tradition. Victorian Sappho traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late-nineteenth-century England. Yopie Prins argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho's reception; what we now call "Sappho" is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics. Prins reads the Sapphic fragments in Greek alongside various English translations and imitations, considering a wide range of Victorian poets--male and female, famous and forgotten--who signed their poetry in the name of Sappho. By "declining" the name in each chapter, the book presents a theoretical argument about the Sapphic signature, as well as a historical account of its implications in Victorian England. Prins explores the relations between classical philology and Victorian poetics, the tropes of lesbian writing, the aesthetics of meter, and nineteenth-century personifications of the "Poetess." as current scholarship on Sappho and her afterlife. Offering a history and theory of lyric as a gendered literary form, the book is an exciting and original contribution to Victorian studies, classical studies, comparative literature, and women's studies.

Poems of Sappho

Poems of Sappho
Author: Sappho
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2018-02-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 048681727X

"The Tenth Muse" sings to both sexes of desire, rapture, and sorrow. This concise collection of the ancient Greek poet's surviving works was assembled and translated by a distinguished classicist.

SAPPHO: for the Student

SAPPHO: for the Student
Author: Jean Elizabeth Ward
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2008-08-02
Genre:
ISBN: 1435732103

SAPPHO: FOR THE STUDENT, is two books in one: Part I is the poems, and fragments of poems by Sappho, with 68 poems by American Poet Laureate, Jean Elizabeth Ward, either paying an homage to Sappho with a Kimo Poem, or a poem inspired by Sappho. Part II is the 1907 book of 100 poems by Bliss Carman. The book ends with a compilation of references for the student in locating reference material and books for the serious student of Sappho. A few illustrations are within.

Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece

Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece
Author: Martha Maas
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1989-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0300036868

No ancient culture has left us more tantalizing glimpses of its music than that of the Greeks, whose art and literature continually speak to us of the role of music, its power, and its significance to their society. In this book two scholars--one of music and one of classics--join together to explore the musical life of ancient Greece, focusing on the Greek stringed instruments and, in particular, on the all-important lyre family. Book jacket.