Chris, though the Lattimore sounds pretty good in all three cases, I much prefer Jim Powell's versions. I was trying to find his translation of Fragment 1 on the internet so I wouldn't have to type it, but that's my favorite translation of Sappho, so thanks for posting it. I think that translation is the gold standard, in fact.
Jim's own poetics, seen most easily in his Chicago book, It Was Fever, were formed by melding classical meters and English accentual verse. He wrote what I consider the definitive essay on Pound's verse, "The Light of Vers Libre," which was published in the Pound journal Paideuma (when he was an undergraduate!!!). In the essay, which I quote from and rely on heavily in my essay "Disorderly Orders: Free Verse, Chaos, and the Tradition," he shows pretty convincingly that Pound was freely adapting Greek meters in his best verse; Jim admits that much of ol' Ez's verse is much sloppier and more genuinely free of meter. In Jim's own poetry, the quantity of vowells and the extra stress they give are important factors in the verse's music. I was always urging him, sometimes with success, mostly not, to make his music and meter more regular and to use iambics more frequently than he usually does, since it's such a flexible meter in English. But I'm rather glad he stuck to his guns and made his own distinctive music, which pleases my ear and which I've grown to admire more over the years.
Yes, I know Alan Shapiro. Alan, though younger than I, was already at Stanford when I arrived and in fact was an initial reader of the manuscript I submitted to get accepted. To my knowledge, Alan never taught at Berkeley, though he did do a couple of short semester stints at various places after leaving Stanford as a writing fellow and Jones Lecturer. He must have met Jim Powell in the Bay area at some point, most likely after I left for Arkansas.
Even as a relative youngster, Jim was rather cantankerous. I met Jim when we were 28 and 27, respectively. He is quite brilliant and often difficult, though almost alone among the group we hung out with then, I was unique in having only one brief tiff with him,which we quickly made up. We stayed friends for a while after I moved to Arkansas, then he had serious employment and money problems that made him even more difficult. I played a minor part in helping him get the MacArthur Fellowship for which he was nominated, then I didn't hear from him again for a long time. But now we're back in touch again by email. And the poems he's been writing since Fever are very much in the same mode. He's also added German to the languages he reads and translates.
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