From The Well of Loneliness to the akarui rezubian: Western translations and Japanese lesbian identities

In his preface to the Mary Barnard translation, Dudley Fitts describes Sappho as

[a] lyricist unparalleled, a great beauty, no great beauty, a rumor, a writer of cultist hymns, a scandal, a fame, a bitchy sister to a silly brother, headmistress, a mystic, a mistress of the poet Alkaios, a pervert, a suicide for love of a ferryman [sic], an androgyne, a bluestocking, a pretty mother of a prettier daughter, an avatar of Yellow Book neodiabolism, a Greek.