Page:The Poems of Sappho (1924).djvu/59

Rh language is unsuitable. It is not really that English is an unsuitable of 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. A point, already noted, in connection with the construction and metre of the Sapphic poems is that they were probably nearly always accompanied by music on one or mote 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