Jim Powell (2019): The Poetry of Sappho: An Expanded Edition, Featuring Newly Discovered Poems. Oxford University Press.
vii, 79 pp. 117 fragments.
Artfully adorned Aphrodite, deathless
child of Zeus and weaver of wiles I beg you
please don’t hurt me, don’t overcome my spirit,
goddess, with longing,
Of all of the post-2014 complete translations, Powell’s is the one I most struggle to recommend.
Like Balmer’s and Lombardo’s, it is a new expanded edition of a previously-existing translation; in Powell’s case from 2007. It is by far the shortest of the modern translations, mostly through omitting the single words and very fragmentary texts. Despite the general brevity, Powell bizarrely includes one of the three epigrams attributed to Sappho in the Greek Anthology, with the note that “the attribution is disputed but not impossible”: this is a decidedly fringe view in modern scholarship.
Powell does not provide an introduction, instead choosing to start with the translations; he does include a brief discussion of Sappho’s life and poetry after this. Perhaps because of the brevity of this material, he lacks the nuance of the comparable material in some other translations. For instance he gives a brief biography of Sappho based on the ancient sources, but pays little attention to the question of how far Sappho’s poetry can be interpreted biographically. He also makes some strange assertions, such as “whatever his name, Kleïs’s father must have died young” (where does this come from?!)
Most importantly, I don’t especially enjoy Powell’s translation. In his discussion of Sappho’s meters, he notes that “matching English syllable-for-syllable ... makes Sappho sound talky or her diction too polysyllabic”; despite apparently being aware of this issue there are several points in his translation where he seems to me to be excessively wordy purely for the sake of matching Sappho syllable-for-syllable.
For instance, Powell translates ll. 11–12 of fr. 31 as:
... my
eyes can’t see a thing and a whirring whistle
thrums at my hearing.
By comparison, Rayor has:
... my eyes
see nothing, my ears roar,
and Campbell says:
I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum