Poetry. This edition reintroduces Sappho to the modern reader, providing a vivid, contemporary translation, which captures the sparseness and the intensity of Sappho's line. The wondrous Mary Barnard translation was based, unfortunately, on the 1928 Loeb edition by J.M. Edmonds, who filled in many of Sappho's fragments with his own Greek lines. In Professor Barnstone's brilliant translation, Sappho's work is presented as we have inherited it, in its darkly antiromantic idiom that rejects sentimentality and "prettiness."