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[It’s no use / Mother dear…]
by Sappho
Translated by Mary Barnard
It’s no use
Mother dear, I
can’t finish my
weaving
You may
blame Aphrodite
soft as she is
she has almost
killed me with
love for that boy
The poems of Sappho (620 BCE–550 BCE) are known through the fragments of them that have survived, and as quotations within the work of other ancient writers. Almost nothing is known of her life, but the themes of her surviving poetry are clear even if their occasions for writing are now lost: a preoccupation with the complexities of desire; the ways that desire can incapacitate the speaker; an intimacy of address, suggesting that her work was to be read by a small circle of friends; the primacy and dislocating power of love.
Submitted by: David Chirico
Tags: The Monday Poem