In Cytherea, amateurish apparatus for translations not hinting about methods, precision in sources and their structures but then again it's not a Loeb edition. A poetess should translate poetry and for all that I know of style the interpretation is at best dull. Reconstruction of her life is interesting, but scholarship of mid-XX century done a better job on reconstruction of Sosipatra's life with less sources available. I know, Sappho lived several centuries earlier, but was much better known than Sosipatra the Theurgist throughout the classical setting. An average compilation done half-heartedly. ( )

Found Rayor's version searching for the gayest translation of Sappho (judging by which way they turned Frag. 102 LMAO), but it also seems like the best translation I've read, the poems aren't unnaturally forced into meter, and they're all there presumably no matter how incoherent the fragment is. Also the notes are interesting and even though this seems like something aimed at classics academics (aka NOT me) the footnotes gave really context and I had a really good time reading this.
I don't know a lot about poetry, like my favorite poet is Mary Oliver just because she's super straightfoward and easy to understand, and I guess the same could be said about Sappho, I don't know how to judge poetry but I just really enjoyed reading these little fragments and wondering what the rest was like. I think this will always have me wondering what the context was

"[I] never met anyone more irritating, Eirana, than you." ( )

So little of Sappho’s 2600-year-old poetry survives that a review necessarily has to deal more with the edition and the translation than the contents.

What little remains of the poetry (actually, song lyrics) I found pleasant. There are a lot of appeals to mythological figures and contrasts with natural imagery. Nice, I suppose, but way too fragmentary to judge as poetry.

This edition lists 264 fragments of Sappho’s poetry, only one of which is entirely complete. The rest has come down to us only in individual stanzas, lines or, in many cases, just one or two words. Apart from fragmentary papyruses and parchments and potsherds and whatnot an important source for these lyrics are quotations from later writers. The single-word or single-phrase fragments are often taken from books on grammar, rhetoric and etymology, where they served as illustrations.

The material surrounding these texts was a necessary companion to them. In her introduction Rayor points out just how little of Sappho’s life is known, and give a reasonably comprehensive summary while noting that other scholars might (rightly) disagree with much of it. She illustrates the many ways in which ancient sources can be unreliable and contradictory: much of what was written about Sappho dates from several centuries after her death, and even then many variants of her biography and poetry were around.

The notes to each fragment explain where it came from (surprisingly often from random quotations in later grammar books), as well as the names of people and places, and what is known about them.

Both the introduction and the notes were written in clear, straightforward language that nonetheless imparts some of the complexities that abound in this area of academia -- and that is not an easy feat. In all I found this a very readable introduction to Sappho’s poetry and some of the scholarship surrounding her. ( )