Mia Lasic-Ellis

Last spring, I wrote a column called “Dialogues of the Dead.” The premise was modest and demanding at once. Each piece took up an ancient author most readers had never seriously considered and asked what sustained attention to that work might still offer. This semester, I am returning to that project. The aim remains persuasion. I want you to read a book you would otherwise pass by, and to do so without apology or defensive enthusiasm.

This week, that book is Sappho.

Sappho is a writer many people recognize without ever having read. Her name appears often, her poems far less so. She survives in fragments, and that fact tends to dominate how she is discussed. Readers hear that only a small portion of her work remains, that we lack firm biographical detail, that much has been lost. All of this is true, but it can distract from the more important task, which is to read what survives with care.

After one fragment, rendered by Anne Carson as “Eros shook my mind, like a wind falling on oak trees,” I think of the first time I knew I was in love, snot-nosed and 14, in the most romantic of forums: a late-night Google Docs chat. Seven years later, I still remember my hands shaking as I typed to the girl from school I had never imagined would give me the time of day. Sappho captures that exact state. Speaking across 25 centuries, she gives form to the nervousness, the weakness in the legs, the mind’s inability to settle on anything except the person before it.

In another well known poem, sometimes called Fragment 31, Sappho describes watching the beloved speak to someone else. I will save you the Greek, but most literally, she writes about the sensation that burns when you see the person you love talking to another: “it is as if my tongue is / broken / and immediately a subtle fire has run over my skin / I cannot see anything with my eyes / and my ears are buzzing.”

Sappho records sensation with such precision that interpretation feels almost beside the point. Read those lines again, and think of the sinking feeling that forms as a pit in your being when you realize they don’t feel the same. Or when they don’t know you exist, or when they won’t give you the time of day or even if they do, there’s still someone else.

Sappho gets it, or got it. That recognition comes even before considering the extraordinary fact that much of her love poetry is addressed to a woman rather than a man. The implications of that have been explored at length, and well, I would point you toward that scholarship rather than rehearse it here. What strikes me more immediately is how modern her poems feel in their attention to sensation and exposure. Reading Sappho, I often forget that she is an ancient Greek at all. She feels instead like a contemporary voice, someone writing from inside an experience we still recognize, with the same nervousness, intensity and loss of control that mark falling in love now.

Reading Sappho well depends on translation. For readers encountering her in English, two modern editions offer especially strong ways in. Anne Carson’s “If Not, Winter” presents the fragments with spare, exact translations that preserve their broken form. The white space on the page becomes part of the poem. Mary Barnard’s “Sappho: A New Translation” offers clarity and lyric force, capturing the directness and musicality of Sappho’s voice. Both reward slow reading and rereading. Neither overwhelms the poems with interpretation.

Sappho endures because her poems train a discipline of attention. They show how experience, precisely rendered, can sustain itself without explanation or resolution. The moments that matter most do not announce what they will become. They arrive suddenly, disorient and linger long enough to change us.

Seven years ago, I sent a Sappho poem to the girl I was in love with in a Google Docs chat and told her how I felt. I am still with her. That detail matters only insofar as it proves the point. Before love becomes a story, or a future, or a shared life, it begins as sensation, as nervousness, as a mind shaken out of focus. Sappho writes at that beginning, and she does so with an accuracy that time has not dulled.

That is why Sappho is worth reading. She understood better than anyone else what it means to love and be loved, that love is “glukupikron,” “bittersweet,” and yet we love all the same.