Recueillis by Sappho

This collection contains fragments of Sappho's poetry—brief verses that have survived thanks to quotes from other ancient writers. Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos around 600 BCE, crafting passionate and personal lyric poetry when few women's voices were documented. Most of her original work has been lost, leaving us with these scattered pieces collected from the margins of others' texts.

The tone here reflects both fragmentation and longing — which makes sense, as fragmentation *is* the state of Sappho's surviving work. There’s an elegiac quality inherent in the form: each line is already broken, already pulled from silence. Reading these fragments feels less like engaging with a complete poem and more like holding a handful of mosaic tiles, trying to visualize the entire floor.

Sappho was born around 630 BCE on the island of Lesbos in the northeastern Aegean. She stands out as one of the earliest lyric poets in Western literature and is notably the only woman from archaic Greece whose poetry has survived, albeit in fragments. In ancient times, she was revered as "the tenth Muse." Alexandrian scholars compiled her poems into nine books, but nearly all of these were lost over the centuries. What we have left comes mainly from quotations found in the works of other ancient authors — grammarians referencing her for her unique dialect, rhetoricians admiring her emotional depth, and philosophers citing her lines as examples. This collection, titled *Recueillis* (which means "gathered" or "collected" in French), brings together these scattered remnants. The French editorial approach highlights the longstanding European tradition of editing and translating classical texts.