[bjornedstrom]

For the 0 or handful of you who like to read critical editions in ancient Greek, here is something to look forward to: Finglass is preparing a new edition of Sappho (and also Alcaeus). https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/major-research-fellowships/sapp...

Finglass is a litte bit of a "celebrity" in 21st century classical studies: his works on for example Sophocles are very highly praised, and I have strong reasons to believe that his Sappho will be really good.

[throwaway894345]

What does "preparing a new edition" mean? Is it mostly just a new/improved translation? Or are there accompanying notes to contextualize for the reader?

[bjeds]

This is actually a really cool subject and you can write a lot about it, but I can try to summarize.

So Sappho lived over 2500 years ago.

Obviously we don't have a complete manuscript of everything she wrote in original. What we have instead are various manuscript copies and copies of those manuscripts, many of which are corrupted, partially destroyed, wrong, fake or has other textual issues. Excluding the fake ones (how do you know which are fake?) these manuscripts are corrupt, destroyed or wrong in different places. Some fragments are quotes from other manuscripts which in turn have the potential issues mentioned.

When preparing a critical edition, you basically collect all of these ancient manuscripts and try to figure out how they relate to each other, and based on what you know of the manuscript and the text you can relate them in a tree (imagine a git commit log with branches)... for example if manuscript B is copied from an earlier manuscript A. Then based on your skill and knowledge you use this limited information to try to figure out what the original manuscript said.

Apart from some old papyri, like the ones found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus, for many authors the oldest surviving manuscripts are often from around the 10-12:th centuary. So if you read Homer or stuff like that, it's been like 1700 years before the original and the oldest surviving manuscript used to base the critical editions used today. So who knows what was originally in the manuscript :-)

These critical editions are then what other scholars use when they translate these poems into English.

The fun part about reading the critical editions instead of translations is they show you what the textual issues are: often it's not obvious and controversial what a particular word should be in the text, if there are many possibilities that are equally likely. The translations will have to pick one interpretation of the text and stick with it, to not make it overbearingly complicated for people to read the works.

Edit: Two more things

(1) The most common textual corruption are related to word anticipation when you copy a text by hand. So say you're a 12:th centuary monk and you copy (by pen) a text, you will probably read a sentence, memorize it, and write it down in the copy you are working on. A common problem is if in a previous sentence you had to write down a word that is different but sounds like a word in the sentence you will now write: it's easy to accidentally write down the old word again.

(2) More nefarious: There are many instances when copyists remove or alter text for political or religious reasons.

[sramsay]

And just to add to the above . . .

This is not a problem confined to ancient texts. If you read The Great Gatsby any time before the 1990s, you probably read a quite "corrupt" version of it. And, of course, there's Hamlet -- a textual situation so complicated, that some scholars have spent most of their careers trying to work it out.

[dorchadas]

If anyone is interested in this with Greek Manuscripts, Peter Adamson has an interview with Oliver Primavesi, who created a critical edition of De Motu Animalium that fixed quite a few old errors and is currently working on one for the Metaphysics using some newer manuscripts that the previous edition didn't use because they were considered too 'young', about it in his 'History of Philosophy Without any Gaps'. The episode right before the interview discusses Greek manuscripts during the Byzantine Empire and how they were copied and such, and various other historical aspects of manuscript design. Two of the more interesting episodes in a podcast filled with interesting things. Episodes 317 (manuscripts) and 318 (interview with Primavesi).

[boudewijnrempt]

It doesn't mean a translation: it means the original text, its variants with commentary. Basically, it's what you'd use to make a new translation. Or to read for pleasure, if you can read ancient Greek -- which I can't, I never got beyond the Anabasis.

[50]

Also, Mary Barnard’s translation of Sappho is very good. I prefer it to Anne Carson’s.