Translator's Note
Sappho 16 is one of the poet’s best-known works. It’s easy to understand the poem’s popularity. Its earnest expression of longing and its message about the subjectivity of love make it relatable to both ancient and modern audiences. The poem itself exists in a fragmentary state, as is often the case with ancient works preserved on papyrus. Papyrus tends to degrade over time, but large pieces often survive in hot, dry climates like that of Egypt. When scholars unwind these pieces of papyrus, they are often left with a manuscript that contains holes or is missing large pieces. Sappho 16 was probably twenty lines long, and we fortunately possess at least a few letters of each line. Even though the poem is incomplete, scholars have a variety of tools at their disposal that help them to reconstruct what was likely in the gaps.
I have translated the words, and the parts of words, that Felix Budelmann considers most certain in his published edition of the manuscript.[1] I have translated the gaps in the text and any partially preserved words as [ ], which is the convention for marking torn or unreadable sections in transcribed manuscripts. The amount of space between brackets represents roughly how many English letters are missing from the word I have used to translate whatever is likely to have filled that gap. In those parts of the text where longer portions are missing, I have tried to approximate the size of those gaps between the brackets, based on my sense of what’s missing.
This is, above all, a pedagogical translation. This translation has two goals: to illustrate for non-experts and beginning Greek students the way that the manuscript looks, and to give them a chance to practice filling in gaps in a poem in English, even if they do not (yet) have access to the original Greek. In that way, the translation is also a model for a learning exercise that could be carried out with any fragmentary work. The exercise itself will give students a chance to experience the act of actually “doing” papyrology without simultaneously struggling through the grammar of fragmentary Greek poetry. Students will no doubt create a variety of different solutions for the holes in the text, and will hopefully defend their interpretation as correct, just like the scholars do as they reconstruct the missing Greek. The exercise is quite adaptable. Rather than simply leaving segments blank, instructors can include the kinds of clues that papyrologists rely on when working with original manuscripts. They could, for instance, include partial letters around gaps. They could also provide two “fragments” of a poem, and allow students the chance to collate the two to arrive at a full version. After practicing in English, the students will be better equipped to tackle the same process when applied to an actual manuscript.
[1] Felix Budelmann, ed., Greek Lyric: A Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 37-38. See also Eva-Marie Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus. Fragmenta (Amsterdam: Polak & van Gennep, 1971).
Robert Carpenter