Sappho: The Fragments
Translated by Henry Thornton Wharton
Of the nine books of poetry Sappho composed on Lesbos in the seventh century BC, almost nothing survives whole — only fragments, quoted by later grammarians or torn from Egyptian papyri. Henry Thornton Wharton's 1885 edition gathered them all and gave each a careful, literal English translation, and it remains the foundational English Sappho. This reading edition presents Wharton's Memoir of Sappho together with his literal renderings of the fragments, grouped as he arranged them by metre and kind — the great hymn to Aphrodite, the famous ode of jealousy, the epithalamia, the epigrams, and the scraps of papyrus. For complete lyric poems imagined from these same fragments, see the companion volume, Bliss Carman's Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics.
