SOURCE: Green, Peter. “On Fire with Longing.” New Republic 227, no. 15 (7 October 2002): 34-40.

In the following review, Green compares Carson's translations of Sappho's poetry in If Not, Winter, with the collection Sappho, translated by Stanley Lombardo. Green asserts that Carson's translation lacks an ear for the lyric meters of Sappho's verse, causing the volume to lose the essence of Sappho's poetry.

I.

Sappho, like Shakespeare, has a remarkable way of attracting idolaters, pseudo-moralists, spinmeisters (mostly with a sexual agenda), and a wide range of crackpot theorists, ranging from the benignly dotty to the angrily obsessive. Her case has also been taken up ferociously by serious feminists of just about every persuasion. It may be appropriate, therefore, and also prudent, if I begin by declaring my own interests and beliefs in the matter of this remarkable archaic Greek poet, about whom so extraordinarily little is known with certainty, and of...