3 Quotes by Willis Barnstone

Ideally, poetry in translation should one day lead a reader to a reading of the poem in the original tongue. The poem in its native phonemes, we often forget, was primarily a poem, and a good one, presumably, if chosen for translation. A poem in translation should be faithful, if to anything, to this primary quality of the original—that of its being an effective poem.

Her time-scissored work is not quite language poetry, but a more joyful cousin of the eternal scant-garde, which is always and never new. So Sappho is ancient and, for a hundred reasons, modern.

Somehow, even the slightest words and phrases of Sappho yield her voice.