Note on the Poem

This is an original translation of a poem by Sappho (630-580 BC), traditionally known as the “old age poem” or the “Tithonus poem” (in the standard numbering by Lobel and Page, it is “Fragment 58”). Tithonus, mentioned in the poem, was a mortal whom the goddess Dawn loved. She convinced Zeus to grant him eternal life, but neglected to ask for his eternal youth. A few words about the translation are warranted. The original poem has a complicated meter that is difficult to emulate in English; the hexameter of my poem is a poor man’s substitute for Sappho’s meter, but I hope it conveys a bit of the music nonetheless. In the same vein, my translation is not a word for word rendering, but more of an interpretation, intended to convey the music rather than the exact sense of the poem. The couplets of the original poem did not rhyme, as mine do; again, perhaps the rhyming will restore a bit of the music lost in translation. Finally, I want to note that the last four lines of my translation are drawn from fragments of the poem which only appear in one surviving manuscript; there is some scholarly debate as to whether those four lines should be part of the poem or not. In any case, my translation of them is very loose, since only fragments of those lines remain.