AN ADDENDUM ON SAPPHO IN RUSSIAN
Many Russian writers mention Sappho, especially Vyacheslav Ivanov; and in a volume republished in Berlin, 1923, (Zovy Drevnosti, Echoes of the Past) Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont has translated eight of Sappho’s fragments. The same poet (Zacharovanny Grot, The Enchanted Grotto, vol. III, 1908) has published a poem on Sappho which my former student, now of Columbia University, Dr. Clarence Manning, has translated in the original metre:
O Sappho, thou dost know alone
How hard the poet strives revealing
The secrets beauty once has shown
In moments of immortal feeling.
O Sappho, thou dost know alone—
Thy name a perfume’s sweetness holy—
The dreams that we one day have known
But lost unspoken, faded wholly.
O Sappho, thou dost know alone
How clearly in uncounted masses
Still unreached flowers yet are grown
Where life through the charmed grotto passes.