Page:Sappho and the Vigil of Venus (1920).djvu/9



plan on which the following translations have been attempted is, I believe, original, and, I freely admit, audacious. The translator has essayed to weave together into connected wholes fragments which, being in the same metre, and, being conceivably connected in a sequence, or sequences, of thought, may possibly have been parts of one poem.

Sappho is known to the general reader only by an ode and a half: but there are extant besides over 170 fragments, most of them very short, consisting in some cases of but a single word. Yet of these many, indeed most, are very tantalizing in their suggestiveness; and our poets, notably Swinburne, have expanded some of them into fairly long poems. The present translator has attempted no such flights. His endeavour has been, not the presumptuous one of restoring Sappho's Odes, but that of presenting some of her thoughts, grouped together, with just sufficient connective matter of his own to produce an intelligible sequence, in the hope of thus making the fragments as interesting to the general reader as