Nine books of Sappho. What reached us: one complete poem and some 650 scraps — a word quoted by a grammarian to prove a point of dialect, a strip of papyrus pulled from a mummy's wrapping, a line torn where the reed gave way. Her poetry survives almost entirely as lacunae: the holes where the text used to be. Drag the erosion below and watch a poem fall into gaps. The unsettling truth this domain keeps circling: for us, the gap is not damage to the poem — it is the poem.
A modern edition of Sappho is mostly brackets. Square brackets [ ] mark where the papyrus is physically gone; a dotted letter marks ink too faint to be sure of; a word in the margin is an editor's guess, offered and flagged. Scholars close some gaps the way this whole corpus talks about closing gaps — by redundancy: the same line survives in two torn sources with the holes in different places, and laid over each other they nearly complete. The metre helps too: the Sapphic stanza is so strict that a lost word has a known number of long and short beats, which rules most guesses out. But most gaps never close. And the strange gift of that is this: a poet of overwhelming presence reaches us as mostly absence — and it is exactly the absence that makes her feel infinite. You finish the line yourself, and the line you finish is yours. That is why she has never stopped being read. Ties LACUNA and the corpus's gap.
Real: the Greek shown is the actual surviving text (public-domain editions), with its real lacunae — where you see a gap, the papyrus really is torn there. The erosion slider is a demonstration of loss, not history (it drops surviving words to show how a poem becomes scraps); the true survival is the 100% state, which for most fragments is already mostly holes.
Flagged: the "reconstruction" toggle shows plausible editorial supplements, dimmed and bracketed — these are scholarly conjecture, never certain, and some fragments (the midnight poem, fr. 168B) are of disputed authorship, marked here. The English is my own plain gloss — no copyrighted translation is reproduced; the Greek is quoted, the meaning paraphrased. To render a loss faithfully is real work; it is not a recovered poem.