Article: Bright Lyre Becomes Voice: Translating Sappho into Songs.(Prose on Poetry)(Critical essay)

Most translations are translations into a specific idiom: Elizabethan iambic pentameter, William Carlos Williams's American 3-step line, and so on. Our musical group, Old Songs (Liz Downing, Mark Jickling, and myself), translates out of archaic Greek poetry and into twentieth-century American folk music, often with an Appalachian Mountain flavor.

When we started, our goal was to bring this ancient literature close. Sappho and the other lyric poets sang their poems, but we don't know what the music sounded like. To bridge the gap, translating song into song seemed more promising than producing still another printed English version of Sappho. ...

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