Page:Cox - Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English, 1916.djvu/27

 crystalline and more finely chiselled Attic of two centuries later. Some writers, especially the earlier ones, emphasize the disadvantages of English as a language into which to translate Greek poetry, the inference being that English as a language is unsuitable. It is not really that English is an unsuitable or inferior language for the expression of poetic conceptions, but that it is different, and that the transfer of perfection in one language into perfection in another is not within the bounds of possibility. Approximation is all that even genius can hope for in the attempt. An important point to remember in considering the construction and metre of the Sapphic poems is that we may take it for certain that they were always delivered in the form of a recitative or chant, and that they were nearly always accompanied by music on one or more of the stringed instruments for which Lesbos was famous at the time when Sappho lived. The early translators do not seem to have taken this into consideration, but have merely caught at the idea of the original and put it into the sort of rhyme with which they happened to be most familiar. The translation of by “sparrows” does not seem a very happy one in spite of its use by Symonds and some others. It is true that means a sparrow or a small bird, but in English the word sparrow calls up a vision of the dingy and quarrelsome chatterer of the London squares, and such is certainly not the most poetically appropriate locomotive power for the brilliant car of the foam-born goddess in her flight “” Even others of the sparrow tribe lack dignity, though there may have been a Lesbian bird which seemed suitable to Sappho. According to Liddell and Scott the word is used generally for a bird, and by Aeschylus even to mean an eagle; though usually a small bird is understood.

Part X, 1914, of the Egypt Exploration Funds publication, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri contains the latest important Sapphic discovery, apparently an almost complete poem of twenty-four lines which are nearly