emily’s Reviews > Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature > Status Update

‘—early Roman writer/translators had complex national and ethnic identities: Naevius spoke Oscan, Greek & Latin; and Ennius, the first great epic poet in Latin, claimed to have ‘three hearts’ for his three languages (Oscan, Latin and Greek), but he was probably also a native speaker of Messapic. The choice to convert Greek literary forms into Latin was a way—to straddle two of their own linguistic identities—’

‘—what matters most—is not whether D. Smith preserved Han Kang’s syntax (she certainly did not), but whether she managed to turn an important work of Korean literature into a novel that was equally powerful in English translation. Translation has the almost magical power to bring foreign viewpoints into monoglot minds and lives. Even in antiquity, people were people—reading ancient literature—remind us of this fact—’

‘Carson suggests—readers need not worry too much about what Sappho herself originally composed or sang—a poet who lived in a particular time and place—whose experiences of desire—of community, politics, wealth, birth, friendship, music—presumably informed her poetry? Perhaps such questions are not fully answerable—the first surviving female author in the ancient Greek tradition—It is not only men who mutilate texts—’

‘Language is never a neutral tool by which we represent the world: every word and phrase carries with it a tangle of cultural assumptions and connotations, many of which are not paralleled by other languages—Reconstructing Sappho from what remains is still like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw—For (Anne) Carson, Sappho’s gender and sexual orientation are of relatively little interest.’