Abstract

Stones is a collection of 37 short stories and prose vignettes that take root in extant fragments of poetry by Sappho, an Ancient Greek lyricist from the 7th century BCE. One of Sappho’s fragments is embedded in the body of each story, as well as generating the title of that story. Rather than attempting to recreate the original poetic context from which these fragments emerged, I have allowed my imagination to dictate the terms of each story. Various translations of Sappho’s poetry are used in this collection: Mary Barnard’s Sappho (Berkeley, 1958); David Campbell’s Greek Lyric, Vol. I (Cambridge, 1982); Anne Carson’s If Not Winter (New York, 2002); and Jim Powell’s Sappho: A Garland (New York, 1993). Additionally, I have approximated my own translations of certain fragments, based not on the original Greek but on a survey of English translations by Barnard, Campbell, Carson and Powell, as well as Guy Davenport (Ann Arbor, 1965).