Page:Cox - Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English, 1916.djvu/21

 of translations from the Greek poets is that called “Collections from the Greek Anthology by the Late Rev. Robert Bland and Others.” Of this there appeared in 1833 what was described as a new edition by J. H. Merivale, and for our present purpose the interest lies in the small section devoted to Sappho, in fact barely ten pages including the biographical and critical notice, which is very short. The Hymn and the Ode are turned into English Sapphics, and the other known fragments are likewise suitably translated, in nearly every case by Merivale, who was responsible for the rendering of the two important poems. The version of these is an improvement upon all that had gone before, though it is perhaps more the work of a scholar than of a poet, and in any case it makes evident the inherent and essential difficulty of filtering through the mind of the scholar the perfervid imagery and clean-cut, mellifluous diction of the poetess, without losing some of the beauty of the original.

In 1838 appeared the two-volume Pickering edition of Merivale’s “Poems Original and Translated” in which the translations of Sappho are repeated. There were several other translations during the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, such as those of Elton in 1814, Egerton in 1815, and later, Palgrave in 1854 and Walhouse in 1877, but these do not call for special comment. They show, however, that interest in the poetess was becoming more general in spite of the fact that for some years the stimulation of new discoveries was wanting.

In 1869, Edwin Arnold published his “Poets of Greece,” a book covering much ground in comparatively small space. The portion devoted to Sappho extends from page 118, and she is called that “exquisite poetess whose genius among all feminine votaries of singing stands incontestably highest,” and is referred to as “the purest impersonation of the art of lyric song.” Swinburne is rightly taken to task for repeating “the untrue and unnatural scandal against her sweet name which gossiping generations have invented,” though