Fragments can engage the reader’s imagination
by actually using the breaks. Poems of recollection
or memory have inherent possibilities.... The need
for and effect of devices used in translating all poetry
are exaggerated by the fragmentation of the text.
Poems with more radical breaks, such as
those with the right side missing as in [‘‘95’’]
(above), are more difficult to work with. The
translator can make the most of the extant text
by indicating missing parts through line breaks
and punctuation. Some translations can even
imitate the physical texture of the papyrus by
showing where the lines were torn. But recording
very fragmentary pieces containing an interest-
ing myth or image is sometimes more a matter of
preserving it than creating viable poetry. One
example is an eighteen-line fragment [‘‘58’’] miss-
ing the left-hand margin, which tells the myth of
Tithonos in the context of the speaker’s aging:
... rosy-armed Dawn
... taking (Tithonos) to the ends of earth.
A second example, a two—line poem, tells
an alternative story to the traditional one in
which Zeus, in the form of a swan, rapes Leda
and fathers Helen. Sappho [‘‘166’’] perhaps sug-
gests that there was no rape and that Leda found
an egg containing Helen:
They say that once Leda found
an egg hidden in the hyacinth.
Small fragments like [‘‘166’’] have inspired
modern poems; H.D. has a series of poems based
on Sappho fragments. One can admire the pieces,
as one does broken statues or shards of pottery.
To offset gaps or lack of context, the trans-
lator needs to employ many different strategies
to make the poem work on as many levels as
possible. Effective strategies include sound and
tempo effects, and even grouping the poems the-
matically. Sounds with a similar effect, although
not usually the same sound, as the source lan-
guage develop the potential of whole poems and
fragments. Translations of Sappho [‘‘2’’] and a
poem by another seventh-century-BCEwriter,
Alkman, both work with sound, especially with
repeated vowels, to echo the hypnotic effect of
the Greek:
Sappho [‘‘2’’]
cold water ripples through apple
branches, the whole place shadowed
in roses, from the murmuring leaves
deep sleep descends.and
Alkman [89]
All asleep: mountain peaks and chasms,
ridges and cutting streams,
the reptile tribes that black earth feeds,
mountain beasts and race of bees,
monsters deep in the purple sea,
and tribes of long-winged birds all sleep.
Sappho [‘‘140’’] emphasizes the ritualistic
aspect of the festival in honor of Aphrodite’s
(i.e., Kytheria’s) lover Adonis, through allitera-
tion in Greek: two words begin with a ‘‘t’’ sound,
two with an ‘‘ah,’’ and the rest with a ‘‘k’’ sound.
The translation echoes the effects:
Delicate Adonis is dying, Kytheria—what
should we do?
Beat your breasts, daughters, and rend your
dresses.
Since an attempt to reproduce the Greek
meter would work clumsily in English, one can
compensate for this by recreating the vivid and
direct effects of the Greek sound.
Placing short poems together will also help
recreate a context through association. Grouping
Sappho’s short fragments according to such themes
as friendship, rivalry, or epithalamia (marriage
songs) builds meaning by accumulation. It is an
interpretive move, for instance, to place Sappho
[‘‘51’’] ‘‘I don’t know what I should do—I’m of
two minds,’’ with erotic poems or with poems
about writing poetry (‘‘do’’ can mean ‘‘set down’’
in writing.)
By paying particular attention to the words
on each side of the gap, by word choice and use
of sound, and by the grouping together of short
excerpts, the translator can develop the available
text, the remaining words, in ways conducive
to the reader’s activity. As in translating non-
fragmentary poetry, the translator abides by
certain criteria that remain flexible enough to
solve the individual problems posed by every
poem. Tactics shift for individual poems, but
the underlying approach should be consistent.
The translator tries to incorporate as many fac-
ets of the source poem as possible, compensating
for what is lost either from the fragmentary
source text or in the transmission from source
to target language. Fragments can make us more
aware of how we ‘‘complete’’ texts as readers and
interpreters. Then we are more likely to find the
balance between over- and under-translation,
finding the elusive fine line that is ‘‘just right.’’Fragment 2