SOURCE: Warren, Rosanna. “Sappho: Translation as Elegy.” In The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, edited by Rosanna Warren, pp. 199-216. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Warren details the influence of translated Sapphic poetry on such writers as Catullus, Charles Baudelaire, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, with a principal focus on Sappho's poem known as “Phainetai moi.”

Our dreams pursue our dead. 

Swinburne, Ave atque Vale

Ille Mi Par …\

He's like a god, that man; he seems (if this can be) to shine beyond the gods, who nestling near you sees           you and hears you 

laughing low in your throat. It tears me apart. For when I glimpse you, Lesbia, look—I'm helpless:           tongue a frozen 

lump, and palest fire pouring through all my limbs; my ears deafened in ringing; each eye           shuttered in night. … 

You're wasting your time, Catullus, laying waste to your life...