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profile/sappho.md
Translated from the Greek by Christopher Childers
Published: Tue Jan 30 2018
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
AGNI 83 Print Only

Sappho (630–580 BCE) was born on Lesbos, where, apart from a few years of exile on Sicily, she spent her life. She had a daughter and several brothers (one exasperated her through an affair with a courtesan), and led choruses of young women, many of whom her poems address. Like her contemporary Alcaeus, she wrote in the local dialect of Lesbos and was canonized in antiquity as one of the Lyric Nine. The Sapphic stanza bears her name.

Christopher Childers’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, AGNI, Barrow Street, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He is at work on a translation of Latin and Greek lyric poetry from Archilochus to Martial, under contract with Penguin Classics. He lives in Baltimore. (updated 4/2016)
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