What We Know of Sappho

So Sappho lived over 2500 years ago.

Obviously we don't have a complete manuscript of everything she wrote in original. What we have instead are various manuscript copies and copies of those manuscripts, many of which are corrupted, partially destroyed, wrong, fake or has other textual issues. Excluding the fake ones (how do you know which are fake?) these manuscripts are corrupt, destroyed or wrong in different places. Some fragments are quotes from other manuscripts which in turn have the potential issues mentioned.

When preparing a critical edition, you basically collect all of these ancient manuscripts and try to figure out how they relate to each other, and based on what you know of the manuscript and the text you can relate them in a tree (imagine a git commit log with branches)... for example if manuscript B is copied from an earlier manuscript A. Then based on your skill and knowledge you use this limited information to try to figure out what the original manuscript said.

Apart from some old papyri, like the ones found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus, for many authors the oldest surviving manuscripts are often from around the 10-12:th centuary. So if you read Homer or stuff like that, it's been like 1700 years before the original and the oldest surviving manuscript used to base the critical editions used today. So who knows what was originally in the manuscript :-)

These critical editions are then what other scholars use when they translate these poems into English.

The fun part about reading the critical editions instead of translations is they show you what the textual issues are: often it's not obvious and controversial what a particular word should be in the text, if there are many possibilities that are equally likely. The translations will have to pick one interpretation of the text and stick with it, to not make it overbearingly complicated for people to read the works.

Edit: Two more things

(1) The most common textual corruption are related to word anticipation when you copy a text by hand. So say you're a 12:th centuary monk and you copy (by pen) a text, you will probably read a sentence, memorize it, and write it down in the copy you are working on. A common problem is if in a previous sentence you had to write down a word that is different but sounds like a word in the sentence you will now write: it's easy to accidentally write down the old word again.

(2) More nefarious: There are many instances when copyists remove or alter text for political or religious reasons.

The poem is beautiful and the translations do its sophisticated simplicity no justice.

Thanks to the OP, by the way, for the astronomical article. I have tried to date the poem as well. And the imagery of the Nebra sky disk made me try even harder.

I went down that rabbit hole a while ago and I found convincing arguments that the Sappho poems were fakes (though the Bible fragments are genuine but stolen). I can’t find the source again. I thought the Atlantic article explained it, but they stop at the Turk who provided them to Obbink. So I’ll settle for “likely forgeries”.

There is only one point in this criticism that is not valid, there is no doubt that the Pleiades referred to the same group of stars as now.

Nevertheless, when dealing with Ancient Greek or Latin texts it is necessary to be aware that a very large number of names used for animals, plants, minerals, places and so on, were used with a very different meaning than today, so Darin Hayton had good reasons to be cautious in his criticism.

Unless one is careful to make extensive searches through the literature, it is very easy to reach wrong conclusions based on misunderstood names.

For example the poems of Hesiod have several references to "adamant", i.e. "diamond" in English, which are hard to understand by those who think that he referred to what is now called diamond.

In fact, Hesiod used the name "adamant" for nuggets of osmium-iridium alloy (collected from alluvial deposits of gold), so he appropriately mentioned it as grey material suitable for making a hard blade for a sickle that will cut anything.

Later Greek authors, like Plato used it with the same meaning as Hesiod. Pliny the Elder was the first author that mentioned the modern diamond, under the name "Indian adamant", together with the previously known osmium-iridium "adamant".