Download e-book for kindle: The Lesbian Lyre: Reclaiming Sappho for the 21st Century by Jeffrey Duban

Hailed through Plato because the “Tenth Muse” of historic Greek poetry, Sappho is inarguably antiquity’s maximum lyric poet. Born over 2,600 years in the past at the Greek island of Lesbos, and writing amorously of ladies and males alike, she is the namesake lesbian. What’s left of her writing, and what we all know of her, is fragmentary. Shrouded in secret, she is still time and again translated and mentioned – no, appropriated – through all. Sappho has so much lately passed through various remedies via agenda-driven students and so-called poet-translators with very little wisdom of Greek. Classicist-translator Jeffrey Duban debunks the postmodernist scholarship wherein Sappho is interpreted this day and provides translations reflecting the appeal and chic simplicity of the originals. Duban presents a reader-friendly assessment of Sappho’s instances and subject matters, exploring her eroticism and Greek homosexuality total. He introduces us to Sappho’s hugely cultured island domestic, to its lyre-accompanied musical legends, and to the fabled fantastic thing about Lesbian girls. now not least, he emphasizes the proximity of Lesbos to Troy, making the interpretation and delight of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey a different concentration. greater than anything, argues Duban, it really is unfastened verse and its rampant legacy – and no folks greater than Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound – that endure accountability for the smash of today’s classics in translation, to claim not anything of poetry within the 20th century. past concerns of mirrored image for classicists, Duban presents a far-ranging beginner’s consultant to classical literature, with forays into Spenser and Milton, and into the colonial impulse of Virgil, Spenser, and the West at large.