Sappho in the Open

Abstract Carson’s minimalist, textually driven, and materially committed translation of the fragments of Sappho is the subject of this final chapter, an oeuvre whose textual history combines rigorous scholarship with fictional interpolation, misquotation, and erotic fantasy. The chapter asks what kind of intervention Carson’s uncluttered, hands-free edition is exactly, vis-à-vis her aim to translate under the fantasy she calls “transparency of self.” Coles reads If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho as the unlikely work that perhaps best illustrates what form is for Carson, and what is at stake in its cognitive-emotional effects. Carson’s text reproduces Sappho’s extant material, but the textual imitation of materiality produces an extreme, high-voltage lyric form whose drastic spaces, stray words, and hedged brackets still-frame the solitary speech of reading them. The role of negative form, of unmarked pages, is to capture what it is we want and need from Sappho, amplifying our logic at the edge.