My favourite part of this book comes at the end of an excellent chapter on the Italian poet and translator, Salvatore Quasimodo, where P. recounts Mary Barnard's encounter with Lirici Greci, the important and innovative anthology of Greek lyric fragments with facing translations published in 1940. In her autobiography Assault on Mount Helicon (1984) Barnard says that it was through reading Quasimodo's translations that she was able finally to find her own voice for translating Sappho. The Italian versions revealed to her ‘the text through the medium of a language that was not English, living or dead, leaving my mind free to balance between the Greek phrase and the Italian phrase’ (Barnard [1984], p. 281). Ezra Pound thought her first new versions ‘vurry nize’ in a letter Barnard cites (Barnard [1984], p. 282), and they are now in the much admired and still widely read Sappho: a New Translation (1958). I pay such attention to P.'s retelling of this episode because I think it encapsulates perfectly the cosmopolitan character of European modernism (see P. Lewis, ‘Introduction’, in: The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism [2011], pp. 1–2). The ‘transnational’ approach, championed in P.'s introduction, is most clearly exemplified in her analysis of how Quasimodo's Italian Hermetic modernism corresponds so well with the aesthetics inculcated by Pound in his followers. The episode shows us clearly how without the Italian Nobel laureate's work we might never have had the first mass-market anglophone Sappho of the twentieth century, had not Barnard's friends, the Paiges, thought to send her Quasimodo's ‘little book’ in the post from Italy. But it is worth noting in this context the strange insularity of the book trade: J. Balmer relates that, when she began working on her Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1984), Barnard's Sappho was still only available to import from the US (J. Balmer, ‘Handbags and Gladrags: a Woman in Transgression, Reflecting’, Classical Receptions Journal 4 [2012], 261–71, at p. 264).
Throughout this book P.'s readings uncover and explain an important instance of the sort of connectivities described recently by E. Greenwood (Classical Receptions Journal 5 [2013], 354–61). What Greenwood says there, reflecting on a special aspect of classical reception in Eastern and Central Europe, applies also to P.'s transnational approach: it encourages us to reappraise the status of Europe in classical reception studies and to think about ‘cosmopolitanism’ in classical reception studies. P.'s significant achievement is to offer anglophone readers the chance to encounter hugely important literary figures such as Pascoli and Quasimodo, and to remind us of the important status of Italy and its modern and contemporary literature in classical reception studies. In previous work P. has drawn attention to the ways in which Italian modernism addressed and re-evaluated the role of classical antiquity and the classical tradition (T. Franco and C. Piantanida [edd.], Echoing Voices in Italian Literature [2018], pp. xv–xvi). In the present book, placing two well known and much studied poets within a bilingual context, P. demonstrates how important it is that anglophone readers especially approach classical reception studies as citizens of Europe and of the world (see also Lewis [2011], p. 2).
I am less persuaded by P.'s notion of Sappho and Catullus as a ‘pair’, which underlies the book's organisation. The weakness of this pairing is most pronounced, at least to my mind, around the idea of lyric, which is not a straightforward category when it comes to Catullus. One might look for instance to D. Wray's discussion of this in the much cited first chapter of his 2001 monograph Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (‘Catullan Criticism and the Problem of Lyric’). In P.'s reception history the Catullus who dominates is the poet who stands at the origin of modern lyric, as we find him in K. Quinn's Catullan Revolution of 1959. As P. rightly says, this version of Catullus is still very popular, and it has made a clear mark in the poet's reception history. But it is not an unproblematic version, and it also has a tendency to edit away much of what is exciting and interesting about the poet, and indeed about his engagement with Sappho. By not really acknowledging the problem of lyric, P. finds herself rather glossing over some of the potential dynamism and excitement of her transnational reception history.
While Wray was right to say that identifying lyric only in terms of metrical form reduced the term to the point of meaninglessness (Wray [2001], p. 10), it strikes me as strange that the second of only two poems in sapphics, poem 11, is barely mentioned in P.'s book (and, oddly perhaps, it is missing from the index of passages cited). As far as I can see, the poem is only referred to in terms of the relationship with Lesbia; there is no mention of its metre or of the likely allusion to Sappho's trampled hyacinths (fr. 105c LP). Yet, this poem has so much to tell us about Catullus’ reading of Sappho and thus about the ‘pairing’ of Sappho and Catullus. In poem 11 Catullus develops, complicates and indeed modernises or Romanises Sappho's lyric voice, making it an important counterpart to poem 51, which has a central position in P.'s book.
In Robert Lowell's ‘Words for Hart Crane’ the poet Crane, who died tragically young, is styled both as the ‘Shelley of his age’ and Catullus redivivus. P.'s rich and illuminating reading draws attention to how both the text of poem 11 ‘and its Catullan persona serve as scaffolding and intertext’ (p. 117). This scaffolding is evident from the start of Lowell's poem with the references to travel, then becomes quite concrete, as P. and others note, with the clear echo of 11.15 (pauca nuntiate). But the scaffolding surely continues with ‘wolfing the stray lambs | who hungered’, which to me evokes quite strongly Lesbia's voracious consumption of her lovers in 11.16–20. I would suggest, albeit tentatively, that in the penultimate line of Lowell's poem ‘who asks for me’ may hold some traces of nec meum respectet … amorem (11.21). P. does not comment on the evocation of Shelley at the end of the poem, but of course Shelley is also a translator of Sappho fr. 31; so there may be more to say here about pairing Catullus and Sappho. I do not know whether Lowell was aware that poem 11 was written in sapphics or whether he could have known that the flower on the edge of the field at the poem's end was Sappho's. But any sensitive reader can see that there is a dramatic change of tone in the final lines. It is not impossible that the introduction of Shelley's name at the end of Lowell's poem gestures towards the oblique introduction of Sappho's voice at the end of Catullus’.
I want to return to the discussion of Quasimodo briefly because this is where some of the issues I am raising crystallise rather well. In her discussion of Quasimodo's Catulli Veronensis Carmina (1945) P. cites Quasimodo as defining Catullus’ book as a ‘diario elegiaco’ (p. 105), which clearly shows an awareness that these poems are not ‘pure’ lyric according to the strict definition that underpinned Lirici Greci. In the introduction to the 1940 edition of the book written by its co-editor, the critic L. Anceschi, ‘“semi-lyric”’ poets including elegiac and iambic are excluded because their tendencies to sententiousness, exhortation and narration bring them too close to prose (cited on pp. 90–1). Of the later volume Canti di Catullo of 1955 P. says that here Quasimodo's translations are approaching a ‘more narrative type of lyricism’ as he abandons Hermeticism for a ‘more representational and accessible kind of poetry’ (p. 107). All this makes it fairly clear that Quasimodo does not work with Catullus and Sappho as a ‘pair’. They form two rather different strands in his output. P. points out too that Quasimodo does not include Catullus 51 in his translations – the poem that forms the basis for the ‘pairing’ is, as she says, a most ‘puzzling’ omission, for which P. suggests the reason that poem 51 does not suit Quasimodo's ‘idea of the elegiac Catullus’ (p. 106). In the epilogue P. tells us that the Hermeticists saw Sappho's lyric ‘echoed in Roman times by the elegiac strand of Catullus's work’.
It is quite possible that my pedantry over the use of the word ‘lyric’ is over the top. In the story of Catullan reception, as P. tells it, with its focus on eros and thanatos, and on myths of poetic creation, it is enough to accept that a ‘lyric’ Catullus must involve a degree of selection and omission – a playlist of poems, which will not easily accommodate the scope of all three (or more, see I. du Quesnay, ‘Catulli Carmina’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Catullus [2021], pp. 167–218) libelli. If we take Sappho and Catullus as two ‘revolutionary poets of love, eroticism and intimacy’ (p. 198), then the ‘slow fire … continues to burn through time and space’ (p. 199). We just need to avert our gaze from the likes of Mentula, Thallus and Gellius as they clamour for our attention.
