The first book of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho held her poems in the Sapphic stanza, and it was enormous: the colophon of one papyrus copy records 1,320 lines — three hundred and thirty stanzas. From that book we still have the Hymn to Aphrodite whole, and the great papyrus fragments printed in this edition’s Major Poems. This work gathers what else of Book One survives, and how it survives is the whole story: not one of these ten fragments was preserved because anyone meant to preserve a poem. Grammarians quoted a line of Sappho to illustrate an Aeolic pronoun; lexicographers, to pin down a rare word; commentators on other poets, to note a parallel — and the poems came through the shredder of citation two lines at a time. Apollonius Dyscolus, wanting an example of Aeolic ἄμμε, gives two words (fr. 38) and adds that they stood "in Sappho, Book 1" — the ancient warrant for this grouping. Each fragment is printed under its standard Lobel-Page / Voigt number with the quoting author noted in the source, so every scrap is citable.

Torn small as they are, the fragments still sort themselves into Sappho’s registers. There is prayer: the wish that the winning lot fall from gold-crowned Aphrodite (33), the summons to the goddess from her cult seats — Cyprus, Paphos, or Panormus (35), and the vow of a white goat on the altar (40), its verb of offering lost in transmission, the broken syntax left visible in the translation. There is the inner weather the love lyrics map at full scale, here in lightning-flashes: longing and seeking in four words (36); pain as a dripping, drop by drop, that the buffeting winds are asked to carry off (37); the two-word address — to Eros, the ancients understood — "You roast us" (38); the declaration to the beautiful ones that this mind does not change (41). And there is the observed world that makes those states visible: the embroidered Lydian sandal covering a foot (39), and the doves whose heart goes cold so that they let their wings drop — quoted by a commentator because Pindar says the same of the eagle of Zeus stilled by music (42). Fragment 32, where unnamed givers — the Muses, the ancients assumed — "made me honored, giving me their own works," reads now like the corpus’s own epitaph.

The Greek text is that of Edwin Marion Cox, The Poems of Sappho (1924), a public-domain edition; its readings are kept as printed, including its print artifacts: fr. 41’s "οἰ διάμειπτον" (evidently οὐ, "not" — the same class of garble as fr. 16’s "γαπ") is translated as the negative, and fr. 37’s "ἄμοι" is translated by Bergk’s conjecture "winds," both logged in the translator’s notes. Editorial restorations stay inside [square brackets]; where the quotation breaks off, the translation breaks off.