Willis Barnstone (2006): Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho. Shambhala Publications.
xlix, 316pp. 150 frr.
On your dappled throne eternal Afroditi,
cunning daughter of Zeus,
I beg you, do not crush my heart
with pain, O lady,
The hardcover edition of Barnstone’s translation, published under the title Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho, has facing Greek text; the paperback The Complete Poems of Sappho, which includes the same translations, does not. The translation is up-to-date for its time, including the 2004 discoveries. In 2019 an abridged edition, The Pocket Sappho, was published, which appears to consist of the introduction and translations from Sweetbitter Love but not the Greek texts or extensive endmatter; it apparently has not been updated to take account of the 2014 discoveries. A new edition is apparently forthcoming; it is unclear whether this will be updated with the 2014 discoveries.
Along with the introduction, Greek texts, and translations, Barnstone’s Sappho includes, in English, a large number of ancient sources on Sappho, and a selection of modern poetry which references Sappho. Barnstone’s introduction is long and largely helpful, despite his acceptance of the highly dubious stories about the burning of Sappho’s work as historical.
Other than his transliteration choices (on which more later), Barnstone’s translation seems fine. I don’t especially like them, but this is more due to personal taste than any major flaw. Barnstone is more inclined to fill in the blanks than other modern translators. For example, from fr. 44:
Idaos the swift-running Trojan messenger
telling of the wedding’s imperishable fame in all Asia
Compare Rayor:
Idaios, swift messenger ... [announced]:
“...
and the rest of Asia ... undying fame
He also has a tendency to gloss unfamiliar names in the text of his translation, rather than in a note. Also in fr. 44, the single word ἰλίαδαι, which Rayor renders as “Trojan men” and Carson as “sons of Ilos”, is translated by Barnstone as “sons of Ilos, founder of Troy” – the phrase “founder of Troy” is not in the surviving Greek. Similarly, in his translation of fr. 17, Barnstone has “Dionysos lovely son of Thyoni” where the source does not name Dionysos explicitly.
Personally, my biggest complaint about Barnstone’s translation is his transliteration choices, which I find insufferable. He spends nearly five pages of his introduction justifying his insistence on using hellenising transliterations of proper nouns such as “Afroditi” which are conventionally latinised in English. This choice annoys me on its own; the fact that the five-page explanation he gives for his system isn’t even an accurate description of what he is doing is just salt in the wound.
Barnstone begins his explanation of his transliteration system in the introduction by noting that “one cannot be consistent without being silly and awkward”. His own system is silly, awkward, and inconsistent. He explains that “other than Sappho [for which he consistently writes Sappho in the introduction but Psapfo in his translations], when the name is so well recognized in English that change may confuse or offend, I stick to the familiar spelling”. This isn’t true. He has no compunction in changing widely-recognised proper nouns: e.g. “Crete” to “Kriti” or “Aphrodite” to “Afroditi”. He almost always renders η as i rather than e – even in widely-recognised “Hermes”, for which he writes “Hermis” – but “Hades” and “Nereids” both get to retain the e. The relatively obscure “Phoebus” is kept entirely latinised (not “Phoibos”?), and the very obscure “Tyndareus” is permitted to keep its final “–us” – despite the introduction making a specific note that Barnstone’s transliteration uses “–os” – but other better-known names do end “–os”, such as “Kypros” for “Cyprus”. Χ is usually transliterated as simply h rather than the more conventional ch (“Haraxos”, “Doriha”, “Aheron”) but an exception is made for Andromache. The introduction contains a long footnote justifying Barnstone’s practice of latinising φ as f (on the counterintuitive grounds that the φ sound in ancient Greek wasn’t “f” but rather an aspirated “p”!) but fails to mention that he consistently uses “ph” at the beginning of words.
Overall, Barnstone’s approach to transliteration annoys me enough that I’m tempted to recommend against him purely on that basis. For readers who want a parallel Greek text, the hardcover would be a useful option – unlike Campbell and Carson it includes the 2004 discoveries, though both have a wider selection of the briefer fragments. Unfortunately only the paperback Complete Poems of Sappho seems to be still in print.