Contrary to the pessimism of American editors in the 1950s who told Mary Barnard that "Sappho would never sell," Barnard‘s Sappho: A New Translation (1958) is now in its fifty-fifth year of continuous print by the University of California Press. Expressing the bare, lyrical intensity of Sappho‘s poetry without recourse to excessive linguistic ornament or narrative padding, Barnard‘s translation is widely regarded as the best in modern idiom, with leading translation studies scholar Yopie Prins asserting that "Barnard‘s Sappho is often read as if it is Sappho." This essay will examine how Barnard managed this remarkable achievement, linking Sappho to the American modernist project to "make it new," to quote Ezra Pound. New archival material is used to show how Barnard declared herself "A Would-Be Sappho" as early as 1930. The essay begins with the reasons why Sappho was appealing to those with modernist sensibilities, reading the development of Imagists Pound, H.D. and Richard Aldington against the backdrop of the public excitement that surrounded the major excavations of Sappho‘s corpus at the turn of the century. The essay then zooms-in on the ways in which Sappho was a vital element in the formulation of Barnard‘s identity as a late modernist writer, particularly examining her appropriation of the imagery from Sappho‘s fragments as Barnard developed her "spare but musical" late Imagist style in her poems of the 1930s and 1940s. If Barnard‘s deep absorption of Sappho in her emergent years enabled her to find a means of producing American free verse in the modernist tradition, then there was an intriguing reciprocation: it was this very "Sapphic modernism," I contend, that enabled Barnard to find a means of translating Sappho to be read "as if it is Sappho." The essay concludes with a new interpretation of the significance of Barnard‘s appropriation of Sappho in her own poetry, noting how, peculiarly, Barnard drew out of her Sappho connection a thoroughly American idiom to pit against European literary autonomy, on a par with William Carlos Williams‘s own attempts to produce a thoroughly American verse. In making Sappho new for modern Americans, Barnard was, I find, making a new language for modern American poetry.
This essay presents a new interpretation of the poetry and significance of Mary Barnard (1909-2001) through an exploration of the relationship between region and poetic technique. One of the first to articulate the "little known landscape" of the northwest in American poetry, Barnard's mid-century poetics can be seen as an attempt to refine and forward the Imagist project in order to create what she called a "spare but musical" style focused, like the work of her friend William Carlos Williams, on her experience of the local. Centering discussion on "North Window," one of over two hundred unpublished poems recently recovered and transferred to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University as part of the newly-established Mary Barnard archive, this essay traces some of the ways in which two particular "little known landscapes" of Barnard's local shaped her Imagist poetics: the austere sawmill settlements she experienced as a lumber merchant's daughter, and the desolate, wind-lashed beaches of the Washington Long Beach peninsula where she spent long summers in her youth.
Born in Vancouver, Washington, Mary Barnard was a writer best known for Sappho: A New Translation (1958) and her correspondence with Ezra Pound, which she initiated in 1933 after reading a range of modernist works in college. Impressed by the economy of her verse (which reminded Pound of H. D.’s Imagism) and her interest in Greek cadences, Pound supervised Barnard’s early exercises in Sapphics. After winning Poetry’s Levinson Prize in 1935, Barnard relocated to New York where she came under the influence of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Williams’ tutelage provided a counterpoint to Pound’s, initiating what Barnard called her ‘spare but musical’ style of poems in the American grain, resulting in Cool Country (1940) and A Few Poems (1952). She later translated this style into fiction, writing mysteries and fables, but also into the clarity and measured rhythms of her Sappho translation. Research on Sappho led to an essay volume, The Mythmakers (1966), which anticipated Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, and Time and the White Tigress (1986), an essay-in-verse exploring time myths. These experiences and creative stages were retold in her memoir Assault on Mount Helicon (1984). Her archive joined the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library following her death in 2001.
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