Notes from Source: What do we do then when this god, to whom we can say neither no nor yes, comes calling? [Moore, Sappho] suggests we make him our material, fashion from him a shape for our desires, a shape that sublimates the desire and makes something beautiful out of a crisis we find dreadful or intolerable. This gesture has a distinguished tradition: Petrarch, for instance, wandering in longing for Laura, “Seeking forever in what-ever place / Some crudely-copied shadowy hint” of her, and sculpting his longing and those shadows into sonnets. It is supple enough to take a number of forms: make something that won’t die out of the fact that we are always dying; make something beyond craving of the fact that we are always craving; making something whole out of our conviction that we are broken. This fashioning activity, in which eros is the material for a form that goes beyond eros, requires a capacious attention in which one stands at once inside and out-side oneself–as Sappho does in the poems that have made her immortal–that is, beyond eros, which is decay. [Richard Lattimore] hews to the Sapphic rhythm, a stately irregular sequence of dactyls and trochees that holds back the headlong rush of thought toward consummation. [Anne Carson] nods to Sappho’s meter in the first line, then departs from it, offering in its place an accumulation of heavy stresses meant at least in part to slow and steady the line. But her free rhythm, though not without nuance, lacks the finesse and arranging power of the original. I suspect, and can only suspect, having no Greek, she is more true to Sappho’s original phrasing; certainly her images have a distinctive brightness and clarity. And yet the form, the well-wrought urn, made out of passion, in which passion continues to storm, unhindered but contained, is lost, and with it the defining quality of Sappho’s attention, its doubleness. In another context, the brackets would be an affectation, but here they are an appropriate gesture towards the damage and indignities Sappho’s poems have suffered on their way to us. They allow us, as Carson says in her introduction, to savour for ourselves “the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp.” What’s more, this way of setting the text, spare and yet bristly with typography, tends to reveal the myriad facets of words and phrases and to create associative flashes among them, until one begins to imagine at the heart of Carson’s poetic project a sort of Borgesian post-modern encyclopaedia, with entries like “If not, viz. algebra, Boolean” and “winter, cf. Stevens, Wallace, mind of.”

Further Notes: Place: Toronto Publisher: Canadian Review of Books Ltd