The Complete Works of Sappho

I have come across references to Sappho many times in my recent reading. So I finally decided to read her works to fill this gap in my reading, knowing it would not take long because so little survives.
The Delphi Classics Edition contains a 2011 Greek / English dual text translation, by Peter Russell, of all her surviving work, about 650 lines total (out of an estimated 10,000 lines she may have produced over her lifetime). That took only about an hour to read.
A couple of odes survive, some shorter pieces which may or may not be complete, and over a hundred fragments of a few words to several lines. Russell's direct translation seems closest to Sappho's voice. And, a remarkable voice it is. Ancient commentators who had access to more of her work raved.
Some fragments remind me of haiku or Ezra Pound's famous little poem about the Paris Metro.

“The stars around the wide moon lose all their shining beauty, as she illuminates the whole earth with silver.”

There are two other “translations” in the volume:
A 1907 “translation” by Bliss Carman
A 1911 “translation” by John Myers O'hara

There is the following note about the Carman “translation”:

“Perhaps the most perilous and the most alluring venture in the whole field of poetry is that which Mr. Carman has undertaken in attempting to give us in English verse those lost poems of Sappho of which fragments have survived. The task is obviously not one of translation or of paraphrasing, but of imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction. ... “

I class these “translations” more as poetic fan fiction mostly built on fragments of her original poems.

I rate Carman's work much superior to O'hara's. Carman seems closer to the original voice of Sappho shown in Russell's more direct translation. O'hara's verse is more stilted to my ear, redolent of Edwardian poetic pretense, obfuscation, and stereotypes.

This volume could really use a short scholarly article about Sappho explaining more of what we know about her, legends about her, her work, what we know about how her work was lost, her critical assessment in antiquity, and her importance in culture. Lacking that, I suggest you at least read the Wikipedia article on Sappho to fill in that lacuna.