Her lyric poetry is among the finest ever written, and although little of her work has survived and little is known about her, she is regarded not just as one of the greatest women poets, but often as the greatest woman poet in world literature. Sappho was one of the greatest poets in classical literature. Poems & Fragments is now the only complete, readily-available translation in English of Sappho’s surviving work. In a new essay on these additions she discusses the issues raised in translating these fragmentary and ever-shifting texts. This second, expanded edition of Josephine Balmer’s classic translation of the Greek poet Sappho has new, recently-discovered fragments, including the Brothers Poem, the Kypris Song and the Cologne Fragment. Josephine Balmer is a British poet, translator of classics and literary critic. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired throughout antiquity, has been lost, but her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments. Her birth was sometime between 630 BC and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC.

In history and poetry texts, she is sometimes associated with the city of Mytilene on Lesbos she was also said to have been born in Eresos, another city on Lesbos. Sappho (Σαπφώ or Ψάπφω) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Lesbos.

Sappho: Poems and Fragments by Sappho, translated by Josephine Balmer

Sappho the poems and fragments