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SJane

SJane

Currently reading

Almost No Memory
Lydia Davis
Selected Poems
Philippe Jaccottet
The Tiger's Wife
Téa Obreht
Charles Dickens (Penguin Lives)
Jane Smiley
The Mansion of Happiness
Robin Ekiss
Schriften
Erik Satie
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho - Sappho, Anne Carson It makes me uneasy to be underwhelmed by a book the rest of the planet rates very highly, but underwhelmed I was. I am neither a Greek scholar nor have I read Sappho previously, so maybe this was the wrong place to start.
There were definitely some good fragments in the book, but a lot of the time I was having an emperor's-new-clothes experience. For example, one page has the fragment:

sinful

Another page says -

]
]all
]but different
]hair
]

The ]s represent places in the original Sappho where the papyrus is destroyed or illegible. There are fuller pages than these, and many of the poems and fragments are supplemented by end notes, which are in part explanatory.

I do like the frequent violets, and the "dripping (pain)" but give me Emily Dickinson any day.