Body Blows (Magill’s Literary Annual 1989)
At a glance:
- Author: Robert Bagg
- First Published: 1988
- Type of Work: Poetry
- Genres: Poetry, Translation
- Subjects: Memory, Adolescence, Love or romance, Sex or sexuality, Death or dying, Time
Robert Bagg is a translator of Greek, a professor of English, and a poet, it seems, in both languages. The first poem in his collection Body Blows is a “free translation,” as he calls it, of one by Sappho. It is a lyrically beautiful translation in which the poet prefers death to the lonely despair she feels upon desertion by her lover. Parting provokes Sappho to ask her errant lover, “why not leave radiant/ as if you remembered the/ honey of it?” She calls forth the memories of “how lazy and sensual” the two had been, of the scents and the feel of lovemaking. The...
[The entire page is 2118 words long]
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