Sappho of Lesbos, the first known Western poet, the one who came to be compared to Homer and even considered one of the muses, has an irregular tradition in Catalan literature, with more admiration than translations, as befits her myth and her history. . In fact, until now there were only two editions, one from 1973 by Mosén Manuel Balasch, in verse, and one by Maria Rosa Llabrés Ripoll, in prose.
Eloi Creus presents I desitjo i cremo (Prow), a new bilingual version that collects all the known fragments (including those already discovered in the 21st century). They are, as the subtitle says, incomplete Poesies, given that what has reached us are mostly fragments, but, as the editor Josep Lluch explains, "less incomplete than ever".
To get an idea of how their transmission has been, for centuries only two fragmentary poems had been preserved until new ones were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century: it was like discovering a new poet, since, for example, it was seen that not all his poetry was homoerotic, as had been thought, to the point that he has bequeathed us the common words sapphic and lesbian. And still in 2004 and 2014 new fragments were discovered, and even a song that seems to be complete, which Creus has been able to add for the first time in Catalan – in Spanish, Acantilado added them in a reissue of Aurora Luque's translation in the 2020–.
Creus, in any case, has not tried to make a strictly philological translation, but rather a poetic one, and celebrates that it has been published in a poetry collection such as Óssa menor. For this reason some fragments of a single letter or word have not been included, and instead he adds, in addition to an introduction and comments, some of the Greco-Latin testimonies that speak of the poet and her work. The work closes with an epilogue by the poet Maria Callís, who appeals to Sappho's "founding legacy" and at the same time analyzes her will to survive, expressed in a fragment such as "et dic que de nosaltres algú en té el record” (“I assure you that someone will remember us”, in Luque's version), and which links, says Callís, “amorosament Salvà amb Arderiu, Marçal, Miquel i altres poetes”.
And it is that one of the things that most fascinates Creus is "to see a modern poet with today's eyes, who we can read as we want, but who resists a non-archaeological reading". Thus, for the translation she has worked on the verse trying to adapt it to Greek metrics and maintain the musicality of poems designed to be sung. So that the poet and music of Lesbos, who lived between the 7th and 6th centuries BC, is not only a cultured reference, but a living poetry within a world as fragmentary as her poems.
Catalan version, here
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