GUESTS: Mary Barnard translator of Sappho Page duBois Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of San Diego Author of <EM>Sappho Is Burning</EM> (University of Chicago Press, 1995) All that survives of Sappho's work are two incomplete poems and about a hundred fragments of verse-- yet she is considered perhaps the greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece. Our biographical knowledge of Sappho is also scant...all that can be said with certainty is that she lived on Lesbos around the seventh century B.C. Sappho's Greek, which is by turns complex and colloquial, has been called untranslatable by many; but Mary Barnard's rendering of Sappho's verse has drawn high praise since it was published 40 years ago. Join Ray Suarez and guests to discuss the poetry of Sappho.
Hymnody means exactly 'hymn song', but as the hymn-singer as well as the hymn-poet are included under (hymnodos), so we also include under hymnody the hymnal verse or religious lyric. Hymnology is the science of hymnody or the historico-philogical investigation and aesthetic estimation of hymns and hymn writers