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Context: I'm designing an engagement ring for my partner, who has expressed her love of both Sappho's fragment #146 ( "Μήτ’ ἔμοι μέλι μήτε μέλισσα"/"For me neither the honey nor the bee" ) and of 17th century poesy rings (example). I would like to design an engagement ring which has engraved on its inner surface a personal reply to Sappho's fragment: "Thou art for me/ Both the honey and the bee". How might this be translated into Sappho's Greek? Thank you for your time!
Basically we just need to replace the "neither ... nor" with an "and", and add "you [are]". The result might look like this:
σὺ ἔμοι μέλι καὶ μέλισσα
This does, however, destroy the Sapphic meter. If you care about that, you could make a couple of slight changes as follows:
σύ γ᾽ ἔμοι μέλι καὶ σὺ μέλισσα
This version preserves the lyric meter of the original (xx -uu-uu-u). There isn't a difference in meaning between the two versions except that the second repeats the "you": "You to me [are] honey and you [are] the bee".
