The scholar Margaret Reynolds has written that “Sappho” is less the signifier for a poet or a person but rather “a space for filling in the gaps, joining up the dots, making something out of nothing.” In this talk I will focus on the construction of Sappho during the modernist period. Modernist translation has generally been seen as transgressive or creative—closer to a practice of adaptation or imitation than to scholarship or to what we might call translation proper. By examining closely the Sapphic texts of an interconnected group of American writers (Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, and the younger poet and influential Sappho translator Mary Barnard), I will be arguing that Sappho is more concrete to these poets than Reynolds’s “space” might suggest; all four are more seriously engaged with the history of scholarship and reception than meets the eye. Their versions of Sappho evade or even subvert existing modes of conceptualizing both the archaic Greek lyric poet and translation itself, illuminating not only their own poetics but also Sappho’s; they thus also open the way for the plethora of approaches that characterize Greek translation today. 

Katerina Stergiopoulou is Assistant Professor of Classics and the Stanley J. Seeger ’52 Center for Hellenic Studies and John Maclean, Jr. Presidential University Preceptor at Princeton. She has just completed a book manuscript titled Modernist Hellenism: Eliot, Pound, H.D., and the Translation of Greece. Her work on American and Greek modernist poetics, translation theory and practice, and twentieth-century philosophy has appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Comparative Literature, the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, and October.