CHS Open House: Playing Scrabble with Sappho Part 1—Introduction to Sappho Poetry Reading, with James N. Stone


We are pleased to welcome James N. Stone, educator, psychologist, and translator, for the first of two sessions on the poetry of Sappho. This discussion will be on Thursday, May 28 at 4 p.m. EDT. He introduces this first session as follows:

This presentation offers a multi-dimensional show and tell of a celebrated archaic poet, a woman famous in her time (~650BC) whose poems come to us in fragile condition, her words and poems mutilated by time and decay, torn into papyrus strips, often indecipherable, and from a very distant past, about which we know very little. Her name is Sappho.
Even in fragmentary condition, the poetry of her fragments resonate—in the “original,” and in translation—with a deeply felt, sonorous, human, sensual, and visionary sensibility that has transcended cultural, temporal, linguistic, political, and sexual boundaries and constraints. For centuries, her forceful presence has defied the odds, captivating the devoted attention of scholars, archeologists, artists, poets, students, and readers from all walks of life.
Today we will explore the dynamics of her resilience through the lens of other great poets, the art of literary translation, the visual arts, and some of the innovative, and ground-breaking, perspectives of contemporary classical scholarship.

Further details of the second session, which will take place on June 11, will be posted on Hour 25 in due course.
Members of Hour 25 can start and continue discussion on this topic in the forum here.
You can add brief questions (up to 43 words) on the Q&A during the live event on the Google+ event page here, or you can watch below:

James N. Stone
Dr. James Stone is an educator, psychologist, and a distinguished translator of both ancient and modern Greek poetry. He is the recipient of the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize (Boston University), the Greek Translation Award (Columbia University), and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to the Literary Translation Institute at the University of Santa Cruz, California.
Picture credit:
Désespoir de Sapho [Sappho, Bion, Moschus], Chatillon, Henri Guillaume, ca. 1780–1856 Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis, 1767–1824, Engraving, 1829, The Getty, Open Content Program,https://www.getty.edu/collection/GRI/download/grioc0004918-D.jpg