古希腊诗人sappho英文介绍.docVIP

Sappho?. The Alexandrians?included her in the list of?nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BCE, and it is said that she died around 570 BCE, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, has been lost, but her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments . Sapphos lifetime witnessed a period of political turbulence on?Lesbos and saw the rise of?Pittacus. According to the?Parian Marble, Sappho was exiled to Sicily sometime between 604 BCE and 594 BCE and?Cicero records that a statue of her stood in the town-hall of Syracuse. Unlike the works of her fellow poet,?Alcaeus, Sapphos surviving poetry has very few allusions to political conditions. The principal exception is Fragment 98, which mentions exile and indicates that Sappho was lacking some of her customary luxuries. Her political sympathies may have lain with the party of Alcaeus.?Though there is no explicit record of this, it is usually assumed that Sappho returned from exile at some point and that she spent most of her life in Lesbos. David Campbell has briefly summarized some of the most arresting qualities of Sapphos poetry Clarity of language and simplicity of thought are everywhere evident in our fragments; wit and rhetoric, so common in English love-poetry and not quite absent from Catullus love poems, are nowhere to be found. Her images are sharp—the sparrows that draw Aphrodites chariot, the full moon in a starry sky, the solitary red apple at the tree-top—and she sometimes lingers over them to elaborate them for their own sake. She quotes the direct words of conversations real or imaginary and so gains immediacy. When the subject is the turbulence of her emotions, she displays a cool control in their expression. Above all, her words are chosen for their sheer melody: the skill with which she placed her vowels and consonants, admired by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, is eviden