Sappho and Shelley: Lyric in the Dative

Who speaks when Shelley translates Sappho? Fragment 31 presents the reader with a lyric subject that is strangely absent from its own poem: it is circumscribed but not described, and invoked only indirectly in the dative case. Through the text it is fractured as well as displaced, and multiplied into a lyrical cacophony that resists resolution. It is this lack of a coherent voice, however, that attracts the translator, who finds in it a mirror of his own inevitable dislocation from the writing scene. Shelley's voicing of Sappho in 'To Constantia' reflects the plurality of his original and opens up questions of possession and affective identification in translation; imitating Sappho allows the radical poet to expand the scope of the lyric genre beyond the individual voice.