Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history. Alexander Chee
About This Quote

A duet is a musical work composed in two parts, each for a different singer. A singer may sing the same song before changing the melody to one of her own, or she may have a completely different song written specially for the duet, which she then sings with the partner. The following information about Sappho is written in an essay that illustrates how difficult it is to translate fragments of texts, especially when the text contains many lines that are incomplete. Often, these lines are not complete but are just fragments of words.

Source: Edinburgh

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