I began to become interested in the language, trying to overcome the opaque screen that a translation cannot help but see what Seneca had actually said' (CARYL CHURCHILL on his translation of Thyestes). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayTranslations of a text that has been around for millennia encounter the problem of missing parts and incomplete manuscripts: translators encounter a degradation of the actual physical text as well as a loss of meaning permeated only by a specific historical context. The "opaque screen" that stands between a modern translator and his classical text could consist of the language barrier, the weight and influence of previous translations, or this factor, the degradation of time leading to a literally incomplete text. The purpose of a text may be completely misunderstood because of these obstacles, but they can also create an incidental meaning or poignancy to a text, which a translator may choose to emphasize. Anne Carson's 2003 collection of translations, If not, winter, is titled after line 6 of fragment 22, and this title conveys her priorities within the poems proper: the technical accuracy of the Greek words has the precedence over making comprehensible sense in English, but this technique still manages to create semantic fields of particular emotion (even if 'If not, winter' is just a fragment of an English sentence with no discernible meaning, it still evokes a sense of bittersweet regret through the possibility of 'if not' and the invocation of winter as a symbol of decay and end.) The fragmentary approach is present throughout the book, of the nine books that lyric scholars estimate that Sappho composed, only one poem it survived intact; the rest we know is incomplete. Trying to piece together the work of the poet Plato called "the Tenth Muse" has been compared to "reading a note in a bottle": his reputation and the mystery of his real life seem to inspire more interest than his actual poems, or at least they influence how people interpret them less heavily, simply due to the actual lack of material. In this book, Carson engages with the culture associated with classical Greek poetry and with the history of censorship and interpretation surrounding Sappho in particular, as they are inevitably linked to The Poetry of Sappho. His aim is an accurate modern retelling of Sappho's original ideas, and he explains: "I like to think that, the more I keep myself aloof, the more Sappho shines" (although he recognizes this, as Derrida admitted in L'oreille de l' (other, Freud's theory of the subconscious in translation means that there will always be a subjective preference.) One way to diverge from traditional translations to achieve this more accurately is to recognize how music and oral tradition may have been central. As Teare commented, Carson uses allusions to literary traditions in his intertextuality as well as in specific texts. In The Autobiography of Red he contrasts the "extroverted epic hero" Heracles with the "introverted lyric hero" Geryon, and in Eros the bittersweet uses oral language. and similarly literate cultures. The unusual structure of these fragments echoes his premise at the beginning of the lyric tradition (beginning the book with the stark phrase "Sappho was a musician"). The empty spaces represented by the brackets and the linguistic technique of interweaving the line fragments probably provide a musicality of rhythm that is recognizably different from the written poetic tradition. Carson declares a kind of apathy toward the much-speculated details of Sappho's lifein the introduction, saying, "It seems he knew and loved women as deeply as he did music." Can we leave the matter here?' By not addressing the issue of sexuality and categorically refusing to contextualize it within modern definitions (as demonstrated in respect to music, indicating a use of 'love' that includes passion for abstract concepts or objects as well as people), Carson is nevertheless deliberately denying the interpretations of other past translations. Sappho plays an important but confusing role in the development of lesbian identification, as indicated by her entry in Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig's "Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary" (1979): to honor her central role in the recorded history of sexuality feminine, Sappho is given an entire page, which is blank. His legacy is also confounded by the appropriation of his poetry for male heterosexual desire, as with Catullus' translation of Fragment 31, and by the origin of the term "lesbianism" as a medical disorder. : Greek culture understood love and marriage differently, so its "identity" as a positive or negative cultural touchstone could always be an anachronistic argument. The modern consensus on writers who have censored or denied the possibility of a physical component in his love for other women, however, has largely decided that it is inaccurate to deny it: as in the case of Calder's dissection of Welcker's 1816 protests that her feelings as an innocent woman friendship was in no way "questionable, vulgarly sensual and illegal". By proclaiming that she is only "[staying] out of the way" and prioritizing Sappho's verses over her life, and continuing to admit that he loved women and did not dull desire in poems like Fragment 94, Carson is legitimizing The Sappho's love for women as an undeniable part of the text. He engages with the culture around the text only to contradict it with the obvious facts within the text. The text itself may be limited, but this external fact of limited textual evidence leads to an incidental literary technique, much like the cultural reception of Sappho's sexuality. made Carson's prosaic position a statement itself. As Yatromanolakis notes, the "insightful, literal translations" become "surrealistic" due to their fragmentary nature, as Carson did not attempt to provide any semantic context to give meaning to the sentences. The context of the classical origins of the text and of its translation itself can, however, be emphasized by this layer of incomprehensibility. The inaccessibility of these fragments as poetry may heighten the perception of the foreign or ancient nature of Sappho's poetry: the reader is always aware of the underlying translation process that Carson is performing. The parentheses used to indicate blank space also emphasize that process, as they are a physical mark on the page that represents blank space. This is intentional: Carson writes in the introduction, "The brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record." of it', since he did not mark with a parenthesis every gap or illegibility, because they would be too many. Pointing out uncertainties in this imprecise but stylistic way leaves room for the reader himself to interpret the harsh emotions that remain: in his words, "it will affect your reading experience, if you let it." Carson is actively recreating the materiality of translating the original manuscripts for the reader, in order to arouse the excitement of a translator looking behind the "opaque screen": instead of guiding the reader through the text with his own ideas or interpretations, he is leaving is open to exploration. As he promised in the introduction:.