On today's menu…

In between admin and spectacularly pointless seminars, I'm preparing tomorrow's poetry workshop - on Sappho (don't Google it at work, however innocent your intentions), Catullus and their translators. Up for discussion: is translated poetry even worth discussing? Robert Frost thought not: 'Poetry is what gets lost in translation'. Are there male styles and male subjects, female styles and female subjects? Does it matter who (if any) a poem is about? Was Sappho a lesbian in the way we mean it? How can we tell from 9 fragmented poems and a few isolated lines quoted by later poets?