I don't know which translator is currently seen as the best, but Barnstone seems to have receive a lot of praise, judging by all the quotes by authors and critics in this edition. This particular collection of Sappho poems was translated by William Barnstone. Like you put all the poems through a paper shredder, and picked up 10% of the pieces and tried to make things fit together. When talking about a fragment, there might have been 10 words recovered over 8 lines. Unfortunately, due to the time her poems were written (~600 BC), and the history of humans loving to burn books, almost all of her poems are just fragments. Sweetbitter Love is a collection of Sappho's poems. McCulloh, Professor Emeritus of Classics at Kenyon College and a special section of testimonia: appreciations of Sappho in the words of her ancient admirers. It also contains the translator’s essay placing the poet in her historic and artistic context a glossary extensive notes an epilogue and metrical guide by William E. His translation, with the original Greek on facing pages, includes a dozen hitherto unintelligible fragments that have been brought vibrantly back to life by him, as well as Sappho’s newly discovered poem from the Cologne papyrus in its complete form. Willis Barnstone has given us a close and beautiful lyrical version. The clarity of her voice, its absolute candor, its amazing fresh authority-whether in addressing a goddess, dancers before a night altar, the moon and stars, a sweet apple or mountain hyacinth, a lamb or cricket, a lover or companion-are qualities that compel us today as in antiquity. Though time has reduced the nine volumes of her work to a handful of complete poems and a collection of fragments, each word and phrase that survives is poignantly significant. Her poems combine an impression of intimate self-involvement with an almost modern sense of detachment. In Sappho’s lyrics we hear for the first time in the West the words of an individual woman of her own world: her apprehension of sun and orchards the troubles and summits of love, desire, and friendship. Plato, a century after her death, referred to her as “the Tenth Muse,” and Longinos, in his first-century treatise “On the Sublime,” uses her verse to exemplify that transcendent quality in literature. Sappho is the greatest lyric poet of antiquity.
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