Aaron Poochigian (2009): Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments of Sappho. Penguin.
xlvi, 95pp. 75 fragments.
Subtly bedizened Aphrodite,
Deathless daughter of Zeus, Wile-weaver,
I beg you, Empress, do not smite me
With anguish and fever
I generally like the Penguin Classics series, and I want to like Aaron Poochigian’s translation, but despite it being aimed squarely at lay readers I just can’t get on with it. It does have some points to recommend it. It has a long introduction which manages to balance being fairly accessible and comprehensive with scholarly accuracy. Its extensive explanatory notes are interleaved with the translations, so readers are not forced to flip to the back of the book to learn important context, and are clearly written with a general reader in mind. And being published in 2009 it does incorporate the 2004 discoveries relating to fr. 58.
So sure, it’s not fully up-to-date and it was never going to displace Rayor or Lombardo as my top pick for a Sappho translation, but it should at least be on a level with something like Carson’s If Not, Winter, right? Unfortunately whereas I think Carson’s translations are wonderful, I find Poochigian’s underwhelming.
Most of Poochigian’s translations are in a fairly strict rhyme scheme, which I always think is a dangerous way to translate Sappho – so often, forcing the translation to fit the rhyme scheme is made to take precedence over making the translation actually good. In the last stanza of fr. 1, for instance, Poochigian accomplishes this by cheating:
Come to me now. Drive off this brutal
Distress. Accomplish what my pride
Demands. Come, please, and in this battle
Stand at my side.
Throughout the rest of the translation, line breaks have been with the sense of the poem – mostly at the end of clauses. Here, in order to force the rhymes, the linebreaks are twice before the final word of the sentence. To me it just sounds clunky.
Similarly, Poochigian’s rhyming at the beginning of fr. 94 makes a normally emotional poem seem to me faintly ridiculous:
Leaving for good after a good long cry,
She said: ‘We both have suffered terribly,
But Sappho it is hard to say goodbye.’
Is this really the poet chosen by Longinus to exemplify the sublime portrayal of emotion?
On the level of individual words I also frequently find myself disagreeing with Poochigian’s choices. In some cases he is too keen to reach for the ten-dollar word when a simpler one would do just as well (“bedizened” Aphrodite in fr. 1; “ventricles” rather than “heart” in fr. 31; the “plangent lyre” in fr. 58). In others, he opts for a distractingly colloquial choice: I particularly noticed “Now she outshines those dames with Lydian faces” in fr. 96.
In the end, I just can’t get past the fact that Sappho was renowned as one of the great poets of antiquity, and yet these translations just sound bad to me. And there’s no enormously compelling selling point to this translation which outweighs it. It isn’t the most up-to-date; it isn’t the most complete. I would expect the selling point of a Penguin Classics translation to be that it is the most accessible, but thanks to Poochigian’s apparent commitment to using the most pretentious possible word I’m not convinced that it even manages that.