If Not, Winter: The Complete Fragments Of Sappho

Not much is known about Sappho, the great poetess of Ancient Greece. Her relationships, her queerness, her family, her death - all these details are hazy, lost to time. Likewise, of the nine scrolls of lyrics Sappho is said to have composed during her life on the island of Lesbos, only one poem has survived complete - the rest are fragments.

In If Not, Winter, Anne Carson has collected and translated all the surviving fragments of Sappho's verse. With the original Greek parallel to each poem, Carson leaves brackets and white space to signal the gaps where text has been lost to time - allowing us to imagine the poems as they were written.