Translating Sappho into Breakfast

Inspired by our man in Madrid, who, because he's far more rigorous (and thus virile, I suppose) than I, regularly (like a bran-laden bowel movement) posts about crap that isn't completely inane, I have decided to give a little insight into the kinds of things that actually make it into my dissertation. So, straight out of my notebook from yesterday, I begin, as always, in medias res:

Shit, I just lost my train of thought, because an (uptight) attractive woman walked into the donut shop, and for a moment I was intoxicated with the line of her legs. Where was I?

Translators of ancient poetry, my (elitist) shorthand for poetry that exists in numerous often inconsistent iterations, who usually have a critical tradition to rely on, typically ally themselves (or refuse to) with one of various pedantic positions regarding textual transmission before rendering the text into a target language. Where Sappho invokes none other than Aphrodite to be her ally (Aphrodita yada yada yada su d' auta / summakhos esso), translators are dependent upon certain minor deities ("if this reading [Diehl's 1923 conjecture] is correct, Sappho may be pursuing her own night thoughts... or else participating in a nocturnal ritual." {all quotes are from Anne Carson's translation of Sappho, If not, winter}).

When rendering a text there are always two kinds of remainder: the grease in the pan and the crispy fat left on the bacon. After all, it's not really bacon if you melt it all off. That fat is part of the its flavor:

of gold arms [
]
]
doom
]

I suppose nowadays most people throw away the grease in the pan, but I, being very much an old-fashioned guy and very much my father's son [at which point I genuinely started to cry in the middle of a Mister Donuts, much to my embarrassment], see that shimmering pool of artery-clogging death and feel compelled to make it part of my French toast or eggs or even the occasional plate of hash browns. Nothing (and certainly no one) is harmed by throwing it away, but it seems like such a waste.

I don't fault Carson for leaving anm [in the Greek of the fragment there's a barely legible alpha-nu-mu in the line just above the one she translates "doom."] as it is; there are so many things it could be, which makes these three letters truly untranslatable, even back into Greek. Besides, some random conjecture would ruin the poetic force of that single word "doom" and turn the bacon into burnt, inedible crud.