Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments of Sappho
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- ISBN 9780140455571
- Weight: 128g
- Dimensions: 128 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 06 Aug 2009
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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'We hear the voice of a great and enduring poet in our ear again' Carol Ann Duffy
'Go, girls, pursue the violet Muses' bright
Gifts and the plangent lyre, lover of hymns'
By turns subversive, erotic and poignant, Sappho is one of the most versatile and exquisite poets in Classical literature. Invoking female deities, Sappho summons the Muses for inspiration and beseeches Aphrodite's allegiance in a battle of the heart, while episodes from the Trojan War are told from a woman's perspective as Helen makes her fateful choice between family and love, and Andromache arrives in Troy to marry Hector. Here, too, Sappho sings of the lives of mortals, as a lover describes the torments of unrequited lust, a mother speaks tenderly to her daughter, and young brides leave their homes to meet their new husbands.
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Aaron Poochigian
With a Foreword by Carol Ann Duffy
Sappho was born sometime between 630 and 617 BCE and died around 570. Little of certainty is known about her life. A native of the island of Lesbos, she resided in its largest city, Mytilene. She composed songs for choral and solo performance on a wide range of themes but is best known for amatory songs focusing on adolescent females. She is renowned as the first woman poet in literary history, and her songs have been universally admired throughout antiquity and modernity.
Aaron Poochigian was born in 1973. He earned his Phd in Classics in 2006. He was a visiting professor of Classics at the University of Utah in 2007-8 and is currently D.L. Jordon Fellow at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. His poems and translations have appeared in a number of journals, including Chimaera, Classical Journal and Unsplendid.
Carol Ann Duffy's poetry has received every major award in Britain, including the Whitbread and the Forward prized for Mean Time and the T.S. Eliot Award for Rapture. In the USA she has received the E.M. Forster and Lannan Awards. Carol Ann has also written extensively for children and has editied many anthologies.
