If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho is a book by the Canadian classicist and poet Anne Carson, first published in 2002.
Carson's translation closely follows the word-order of Sappho's Greek, and marks lacunae in the manuscripts with square brackets.
]work ]face ] ] if not, winter ]no pain ] ]I bid you sing of Gongyla, Abanthis, taking up your lyre as (now again) longing floats around you,
[3] She uses square brackets in her translations to indicate lacunae in the original text, which she describes as "an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event";[6] she also makes use of white space, breaking up some fragments over multiple lines.
[8] However, Emily Wilson praised Carson's notes, saying that they "should enable even the Greekless reader to understand some of the most important textual problems in Sappho".
[14] In the 2021 Cambridge Companion to Sappho, Barbara Goff and Katherine Harloe judge it "a defining translation" of the post-1980 era.