pieces of the purple sea

A New Translation of Sappho

COMING 2.11.2025

Sappho was a poet from the island of Lesbos in the 7th century BCE, who was highly celebrated for her lyrical verses and whom Plato dubbed “the tenth Muse.” She is one of our earliest examples of a poet who turned inwards at the self rather than contributing solely to the epic traditions popular before her. She gives us lyrics about love, about marriage, about her brothers; she gives us longing and desire, and she had an eye for the finer things in life, like fashionable hairstyles, fine dresses, and beautiful crowns. Of the thousands of lines of poetry that she supposedly wrote, only a few hundred of these lines have been preserved—most of them in fragments found among the frayed fibers of papyrus, among the writings of later authors who admired her work. With the very little of her work that remains, she leaves us an echo of a luxuriant world of yearning for what’s just out of reach.

Brendon Zatirka has captured as much of her surviving work as possible in a new, metrical collection that maintains Sappho’s sensual verses, her attention to beautiful things, and her raw emotions of desire.