With Sappho, where else to begin but on the pillow? In the summer and fall of 1951, the forty-one-year-old poet Mary Barnard was convalescing in her parents’ house in Vancouver, Washington, after two long stretches in the hospital for serious illnesses. Confined at home, Barnard turned to ancient Greek, which she’d studied at college. “If you have to be in bed for weeks at a time,” she later wrote, “there is nobody better to be in bed with than Homer—in the original.” (Others had gone to bed with Homer before her: Alexander the Great is alleged to have kept an edition of the Iliad “under his pillow.”) While Barnard had twelve books of the Iliad and the Odyssey apiece propped up on her own pillows, some friends sent her Salvatore Quasimodo’s selection of Greek lyric poetry, which included the Greek originals alongside his Italian translations. Among them were Quasimodo’s translations of Sappho. Sappho originally composed her poetry for musical accompaniment around 600 B.C.E., writing poems for both solo and choral performance on themes ranging from religious ritual to romantic love and erotic desire.

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