A ball gown torn to tatters, of course, but you can garner so much from even a thumbnail patch of fabric. The texturing, the material, the colour, you have to extrapolate somewhat, but the picture is begging to be formed. The romances as epics, the erotic and the sombre cuddling weepily, the boner jokes, the bitching about her brother's girlfriend. Even in just a handful of obscured glimpses, it's all here.

You'll get all of this and more from every compilation of Sappho's work, so let's pay some special attention to the more, which, while maybe not the best more on the market, is ideal for a first encounter.

Stung With Love begins with an extended essay courtesy of one Carol Ann Duffy, a nice splashing of historical background, but ultimately inessential. What makes this particular book such a good gateway drug is how translator Aaron Poochigian presents the work. This translation emphasises rhyme in a way more akin to conventional English poetry than any ancient Greek tradition. This is a clever way to evoke the poems' original lives as Greek lyric to a Western sensibility and make them more accessible to green eyes. In addition, each poem faces a lovely little breakdown showing what the archaic references and mythological wordplay might be on about. This approach robs some of the mysticism from the work, of course, but that's where I direct you to Anne Carson's free verse translation If Not, Winter, which pulls every painterly stroke from the fragments we have and leaves ample space for you to fill in the gaps of what we don't. Between the two you get the full picture of the half picture, academically and artistically. Still, Stung gives what I view as a necessary education to wring as much as possible from both approaches. It's a tragedy we have to 'wring' anything, whichever way you slice it, but these scattered gems sparkle on a wavelength that is well worth the effort to locate.

Stung with Love Penguin Classics

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