Antiquitopia

I'm reading Sappho's lyrics, attempting the Greek, but being held up by translation. I am simply not used to her 7th century BCE Aeolic dialect. Even so, I can still work it out, and poetry is always best in its original language. I am reading it and the translation given by Willis Barnstone's Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho , who tries to create poetic English cadences. Although her complete poems (there are only two surviving!) are well-known, her fragmentary poems are quite haunting. I was caught by two different fragments about the moon--what is more haunting than the moon? πλήρης μὲν ἐφαίνετ' ἀ σελάννα αἰ δ'ὠς περὶ βῶμον ἐστάθησαν Full the moon appeared when the women stood about the altar. (frag. 154; translation mine) ἄστερες μὲν ἀμφὶ κάλαν σελάνναν ἂψ άπθκρύπτοισι φάεννον εἶδος, ὄπποτα πλήθοισα μάλιστα λάμπηι γᾶν ἀργυρία Stars around the beautiful moon conceal their luminous form when in her fullness she greatly shines on the earth in silver (f...

Venus and the Moon last night (12/31/08):

A follow-up on my last posting about the coincidence of the Moon and Venus from Space.com (although I picked it up from Yahoo! News): Celestial Show Set for New Year's Eve Robert Roy Britt Editorial Director SPACE.com robert Roy Britt editorial Director space.com Tue Dec 30, 11:47 am ET A delightful display of planets and the moon will occur on New Year's Eve for anyone wishing to step outside and look up just after sunset. Venus, brighter than all other planets and stars, will dangle just below the thin crescent moon in the southwestern sky. It'll be visible -- impossible to miss, in fact -- just as the sun goes down, assuming skies are cloud-free. Soon thereafter, Mercury and Jupiter will show up hugging the south-southwestern horizon (just above where the sun went down) and extremely close to each other. Jupiter is very bright and easy to spot; Mercury is faint and harder to see, but it'll be apparent by its location just to the left of Jupiter. Jupiter and Mercury ...