Stung with Love : Poems and Fragments

More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry among them poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. This is a new translation of her surviving poetry.

Sappho was born sometime between 630 and 617 BC and died around 570. She was a native of the island of Lesbos and is renowned as the first woman poet in literary history.

Aaron Poochigian is the D. L. Jordon Fellow at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. His poems and translations have appeared in a number of journals, including Chimaera, Classical Journal, and Unsplendid.

Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet and playwright.