Sappho

Sappho was an ancient Greek lyric poet, born around 610 BCE on the island of Lesbos and died around 570 BCE. She wrote monodic lyric songs in the Aeolian dialect, dealing mostly with personal emotion and communities of women, in a plain and direct style; the ancients called her the "Tenth Muse." Her poetry was collected in ten books but is almost entirely lost, leaving only one complete poem and a few fragments, and public information about her life and the full scope of her work is limited. Three of her works are included here: Sappho: A New Rendering, Les poésies de Sapho de Lesbos, and The Poems of Sappho: An Interpretative Rendition into English, showing that her poems have been continually translated and reinterpreted. Sappho's writing captures desire, parting, and female friendship in the first person, with concise, musical language, and has deeply influenced the Western lyric tradition.