I became interested in language, trying to get through the opaque screen that a translation cannot help but be to see what Seneca really said” (CARYL CHURCHILL on his translation of Thyestes). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay Translations of a text that has existed for millennia face the problem of missing parts and incomplete manuscripts: translators face a challenge degradation of the actual physical text as well as a loss of meaning imbued only by specific historical context. The "opaque screen" which stands between a modern translator and his classical text could be constituted by the language barrier, the weight and influence of previous translations, or this factor, the degradation of time leading to a text literally incomplete. The purpose of a text can be completely misunderstood because of these obstacles, but they can also create incidental or poignant meaning in a text, which a translator may choose to emphasize. Anne Carson's 2003 collection of translations, If not, winter, is titled after line 6 of fragment 22, and this title expresses her priorities in the poems themselves: the technical precision of the Greek words takes precedence over the understanding of the meaning in English, but this technique still succeeds in creating semantic fields of particular emotion (although "Otherwise, winter" is just a fragment of an English sentence with no discernible meaning, it nevertheless evokes a feeling of bittersweet regret through the possibility of "otherwise" and the invocation of winter as a symbol of decadence and end.) The fragmentary approach is present throughout the book, among the nine books that lyric scholars believed to have been composed by Sappho, only one poem has survived intact; the rest that we know of is incomplete. Trying to reconstruct the work of the poet Plato called "the Tenth Muse" has been compared to "reading a note in a bottle": its. reputation and the mystery of his real life seem to inspire more interest than his actual poems, or at least less strongly influence how people interpret them, simply due to the actual lack of material. In this book, Carson is interested in the culture associated with classical Greek poetry, and the history of censorship and interpretation surrounding Sappho in particular, as they are inevitably linked to Sappho's poetry. Her aim is to accurately and modernly recount Sappho's original ideas, and she explains: "I like to think that the more I stand aside, the more Sappho shines" (although she acknowledges that, as Derrida admitted in The (ear of the other, Freud's theory of the subconscious in translation means that there will always be a subjective preference.) One way to diverge from traditional translations to achieve this more precisely is to recognize how music and oral tradition may have played a central role. As Teare commented, Carson uses allusions to literary traditions in her intertextuality as well as in specific texts. In The Autobiography of Red, she contrasts the "extroverted epic hero. » Heracles to the "introverted lyrical hero" Geryon, and in Eros the Bittersweet, she uses orality and literate cultures in the same way. The unusual structure of these fragments echoes her premises in the early lyrical tradition. (beginning the book with the austere phrase "Sappho was a musician.") The empty spaces represented by parentheses and the linguistic technique of strand-line fragments arguably provide a musicality of rhythm recognizably different from the written poetic tradition. Carson declaressort of apathy toward the much-speculated details of Sappho's life in the introduction, saying, "It seems she knew and loved women as deeply as she made music." Can we leave it there? By not addressing the issue of sexuality and categorically refusing to contextualize it within modern definitions (as evidenced by the comparison to music, indicating a use of the term "love" that encompasses a fondness for abstract concepts or objects as well as for people), Carson however deliberately denies the interpretations of other past translations. Sappho plays an important but confusing role in the development of lesbian identification, as indicated by her entry in Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig's "Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary" (1979): to honor her central role in the recorded history of female sexuality. , Sappho receives an entire page, which is blank. Her legacy is also confused by the appropriation of her poetry for male heterosexual desire, such as in Catullus' translation of Fragment 31, and by the origin of the term "lesbianism" as a medical disorder. : Greek culture understood love and marriage differently, so its "identity" as a positive or negative cultural touchstone may still be an anachronistic discussion. The modern consensus on writers who censored or denied the possibility of a physical component in his love for other women, however, has largely decided that it was inaccurate to deny it: as with Calder's dissection of Welcker's protests of 1816 according to which his feelings as an innocent woman friendship was in no way "reprehensible, vulgarly sensual and illegal". By proclaiming that she is only "on the sidelines" and prioritizing Sappho's verses over her life, while admitting that she loved women and not hiding desire in poems like the Fragment 94, Carson legitimizes Sappho's love for women as an undeniable element of the text. She engages with the culture around the text only to contradict it with the obvious facts of the text. The text itself may be limited, but this outward fact of limited textual evidence leads to an incidental literary technique, as does the cultural reception of Sappho's sexuality. made Carson's prosaic stance a statement in itself. As Yatromanolakis notes, "deeply literal translations" become "surreal" due to their fragmentary nature, because Carson did not attempt to provide semantic context to make sense of the expressions. The context of the text's classical origins and its translation itself can, however, be underlined by this layer of incomprehensibility. The inaccessibility of these fragments as poetry may heighten the perception of the foreign or ancient nature of Sappho's poetry: the reader is always aware of the underlying process of translation that Carson is carrying out. The parentheses used to indicate space also emphasize this process, because they are a physical mark on the page representing empty space. This is intentional: Carson writes in the introduction: “The parentheses are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record. of it", because she did not mark with a parenthesis all the gaps or illegibilities, because there would be far too many. Indicating the uncertainties in this inaccurate but stylistic way leaves the reader himself the possibility of interpret the strong emotions that remain: in his words, "it will affect your reading experience, if you let it." Carson actively recreates the materiality of the translation of the original manuscripts for the reader, in order to inspire one's enthusiasm. translator.