Melissa Mueller Edits New Collector's Edition of Barnard's Sappho

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A new collector's edition of Mary Barnard's translation of Sappho, edited by Melissa Mueller, professor of classics, will be published Sept. 1 by the University of California Press.

Sappho: The Mary Barnard Translation (Collector's Edition) reissues a translation first published in 1958 as Sappho: A New Translation, which has remained in print since. Mueller wrote a new introduction for the volume and compiled the original Greek for the 100 poems and fragments Barnard translated. It is the first edition to present Barnard's English alongside the Greek.

Barnard (1909–2001) was an American poet and translator who studied Greek at Reed College and began translating at the suggestion of Ezra Pound in the 1930s. Rather than presenting the fragments as isolated scraps, she arranged them into a sequence that follows a woman's life. Her version became the one through which generations of English-language readers first encountered the poet. The new edition retains the foreword Dudley Fitts wrote for the original.

Mueller has taught at UMass Amherst since 2007 and writes on archaic and classical Greek poetry, with research interests in new materialisms, reparative reading, and gender and sexuality studies. Her book Objects as Actors argues that stage props are integrated into Greek tragic performance as actors in their own right, prompting turns of plot and reactions from audiences inside and outside the play. She is co-editor of The Materialities of Greek Tragedy and, with Lilah Grace Canevaro, series editor of Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms. Her book Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's turn toward reparative reading to reconsider how Sappho engages Homer. 

She holds a BA from Barnard College, an MA from King's College, Cambridge, and a PhD in classics from the University of California, Berkeley.