By Danielle Wallace
Concealed in a corner,
Another translation of ‘The Great Sappho’s Fragments’ (2023).
Her oval eyes dead-center her oval face.
Pupils staring silently; I admit I do not know her.
Yet, when I think of what they did to her…
Flicking fragments 32, 129, 191…
-Certainly, no man ever can.
Puppet on the cliff face,
and thrust downwards to the foam-topped, erect boulders below.
Blank spaces filled with matrimonial slush.
Histories erased; passions extinguished: the birth of their poetESS.
Sappho, O Sappho. Their Sappho.
In these moments,
She burns and cries deep inside me.
The girl behind the desk
holds out her hand, and I place the poet between her fingers.
– I swear it –
The corner of her mouth curls just for me
and she pushes back her heavy lids.
She sees that I see it,
and we both feel her.
-Certainly, no man ever can.
Danielle Wallace is an aspiring writer and artist, a Ph.D. student at the University of Birmingham, U.K. She is currently researching the presence and significance of Sappho in Modernist poetry.
* ‘γλυκύμαλον’ is a phrase from Sappho’s fragment 105a and roughly translates to “sweet apple.”