Pound’s Ripostes to Greek Lyric

“Sometimes I use rules of Spanish, Anglo-Saxon and Greek metric that are not common in the English of Milton’s or Miss Austen’s day” (L 4). So Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on October 21, 1908, defending in a nineteen-page letter what seemed to his friend – and to many of his early reviewers – as “poetic anarchy” in his writing. In 1910–12 Pound turns away even from what was mistakenly considered the free verse directness of Personae and looks backwards more intently, trying to reproduce in English the formal complexities of Provençal troubadours and Guido Cavalcanti. His language becomes less direct, less spoken, and more archaic; while T. E. Hulme and others in his London circle are discussing vers libre, Pound’s work focuses on two much earlier Romance-language avant-gardes. After the very negative reception of the resulting Canzoni (1911), he turns to even earlier models to find the clarity he was accused of lacking. He translates the Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer” and explores Greek poetics more seriously, a double gesture that would prove useful again a few years later in the writing of Canto 1. But it is Ripostes, published in December 1912, that first bears the fruit of those efforts, though by that point, after the launching of H.D., Imagiste, Pound was well on his way towards abandoning them.

Pound’s own personal interest in Greek in late 1911 to early 1912 – that is, before seeing H.D.’s first poems from the Anthology – had been less imagistic and more metrical, as the letter to Williams suggests. Perhaps spurred by the 1909 publication of newly discovered manuscripts of Sappho, Pound composes “Apparuit” in 1912 in quantitative sapphic stanzas, and confesses to Dorothy Shakespear that “My one comfort is this sapphic affair” (L/DS 63). Showing how central Greek metrics was becoming in his poetic thinking, he adds:

Pound’s search for such a system in English had already begun with the intricate forms of Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel. But as he turns to the basis of the English language in Anglo-Saxon, studying it in the “Seafarer” original and writing a version of it in his translation, he seems to begin to wonder whether there can be such a system discovered in the language itself – similar to what he saw as the mostly fixed, rule-bound Greek quantities – rather than imposed on it.Footnote ⁶ Having tried the Romance model and failed, he turns then to the hellenic. It too would “mean mess.”

In Ripostes, in the midst of poems whose titles are in French and Latin, refer to places in Egypt and America, and feature names of Italian or German artists, we have different modes of engagement with Greek lyric, they too among the plethora of Pound’s “ripostes” to a mostly Mediterranean cultural tradition. The collection’s third poem, “Apparuit” – its Latin title (quoted from Dante, third Latin title in a row) belying its Greek form – is in quantitative sapphics. “Echoes” consists of two sections, the second one of which comprises translations of two Greek epigrams (“Asclepiades, Julianus Aegypt[i]us,” as Pound cryptically notes, not clarifying the relationship). “Δώρια” has a Greek title, jagged lineation, a mostly triple rhythm, and many long vowels. “Pan Is Dead” reads like a light parody of Bion’s “Lament for Adonis” (first/second century bce), a poem much admired by Pound; Pan dies “upon such hollow season” that “there is no summer in the leaves” and therefore the mourning chorus cannot “weave a coronal, / Or gather floral pledges” (P&T 243). The sequence concludes with “The Return,” whose relation to Greek is more nebulous; yet the poem was declared “an important study in a verse which is really quantitative” by T. S. Eliot (CP 1, 636) and proclaimed “translated at sight from an unknown Greek masterpiece” by W. B. Yeats.Footnote ⁷ With the exception of “Pan Is Dead,” all of these poems were published in journals between January and June 1912, and thus were presumably written before Pound saw H.D.’s three poems based on the Anthology.

In “Villanelle: A Psychological Hour” Pound constructs a “metaphorical villanelle,” as Christine Froula puts it, “in which the obsessive repetitions of the form are abstracted” into a series of “thematic obsession[s]”: “I wanted the effect of a recurrence of a theme and meant ‘Villanelle’ to mean generally the feel of the villanelle form in a modern subject,” Pound writes to his father.Footnote ⁸ We can read Pound’s treatment of “Greek” in Ripostes in just this way. Without conventionally translating a single Greek poem, he nonetheless tries to convey aspects of Greekness in a variety of ways while moving along a roughly historical axis. We have Greece as poetic form/lyric (sapphic stanza in “Apparuit”); Greece as moral attitude/philosophy (Greek Anthology epigrams, one relatively early [third century bce], one late [sixth century ce]); Greece as symbol or style or term (“Δώρια,” intentionally timeless, focused on “eternal moods,” heightened by the physical presence of Greek letters); Greece as paganism/religion (concluded by the death of Pan and leaving a scene so dire that he cannot even be remembered in song); and finally Greece as a ghost that nonetheless “return[s].”

At the same time, in almost every case, the “Greek” poem is linked to a different tradition. The Latin title of “Apparuit,” as well as the poem itself with its presentation of a luminous, ethereal, ideal lady, quotes, then echoes Dante’s description of Beatrice in Vita Nova. Pound points to a continuing tradition of love poetry from Sappho to Dante, with Greek mediated by Latin, where what miraculously appears in English is both the beloved and sapphic meter itself. He then attempts to juxtapose (rather than conjoin) a medieval mystical vision with an ancient pagan form in “Echoes.” The poem’s first sectionFootnote ⁹ consists in “Guido Orlando, Singing” a song of praise to the “Lady of Valour,” while the combined Greek epigrams in the second section elaborate on a carpe diem theme. (That the Italian original of Guido Orlando is addressed to Cavalcanti, in response to his somewhat pagan poem, only amplifies the tension.) “Δώρια” contrasts that very Greek-seeming not-Greek word that may suggest a specific ethnic group or dialect or architectural rhythm with the abstract and non-human elements the speaker desires – “the eternal moods / of the bleak wind,” “the strong loneliness / of sunless cliffs / And of grey waters” (P&T 241). Pound thus marks the dilution of Greek referential specificity into a modern sensibility that could be evoked in shorthand, Victor Plarr’s book In the Dorian Mood (1896) no doubt in Pound’s mind. The particular form of the word in the title, between Δωριεῖς [Dōrieis] ‘Dorians’ and δώρα [dōra] ‘gifts,’ unites the poem’s expressed wish or invocation (that something be given) with the thing wished for: Doric clarity, simplicity, austerity.Footnote ¹⁰ Similarly, “The Return” plays with phrases that read like stock translations for Homeric epithets – “the ‘Wing’d-with-Awe’” (complete with quotation marks though it has no other source) and “Gods of the wingèd shoe” – or transliterations of Greek exclamations (“Haie! Haie!”), while “Pan Is Dead” hits a very British note, turning the mourning “maidens” into clamoring Victorian ladies: “That I may not say, Ladies. / Death was ever a churl” (P&T 244, 245, 243). Already Pound is attempting to make sense of “Greece” through its previous cultural/literary mediations, as he will more famously do several years later in the first canto.

Yet despite the ambition evident in this rapprochement to Greek, the poetic results are uneven. The most successful and anthologized poems, “Δώρια” and “The Return,” are the ones that treat Greek as a particular idea, rather than as text. They are also the only ones that begin to move, if not towards spoken English, at least towards avoiding archaisms except as necessary for the poem (as suggested with the “Homeric” phrases above, or with the use of inversion in the same poem, which is essential to its performative rhythm).Footnote ¹¹ Though “Apparuit” is a technical feat, its syntax is overly convoluted, and the lines, overloaded with th- articles and pronouns to facilitate quantitative scansion, feel stilted:Footnote ¹²

What would become one of Pound’s rhythmic signatures, the adonic line (the last line of a sapphic stanza, made up of a dactyl followed by a spondee or trochee), is here often rather weak in effect, partly because of its reliance on non-lexical words: “golden about thee,” “faded about thee,” “dar’dst to assume this” (P&T 232). In contrast, “The Return” uses versions of the adonic (usually plus an extra short/unstressed syllable) much more powerfully in its tight, declarative, noun-based lines:

Just as the unnamed “they” who “return” are finally recognized and described in the poem, so this ancient way of organizing syllables comes most strongly to the fore here, allowing the quantitative and stress-based scansions to coincide.Footnote ¹³ Similarly, “Δώρια” evokes the wind’s breath with its preponderance of long vowels, yet at the same time expertly modulates between a rising and a falling stress pattern, thus absorbing archaisms like “In days hereafter” or the final “Remember thee” into its hypnotic rhythm in a way that Pound’s actual Greek Anthology translations do not.

The repetition that works so well in “The Return” loses its verve in the first stanza of “Echoes II,” the translation of Asclepiades:

As in “Apparuit,” the repetition of the th- words, coupled with that of the overly consonantal “think’st,” make the poem into a tongue-twister. Lexically, Pound’s main effort here is to avoid the Victorian “maidenhood” (for the Greek partheniēs) used by Mackail and Andrew Lang in their translations, choosing to synecdochically replace it with the easily readable image of the rose.Footnote ¹⁵ But as the image expands into “rose-time” and the further metaphor of the “new roses,” Asclepiades’ directness is lost except, somewhat, in the tone of voice. Despite the freedom in word choice and image, Pound maintains some structural elements of the Greek poem – evidence that here too he is interested in form. The parallelism between Hades and Acheron, found at the ends of lines 1 and 3, is modernized into “Death” and “Dark House,” roughly visually aligned with each other despite their different positions in the line. The return of the “rose” in the final line replicates that of παρθένε [parthene] ‘virgin’ in the last line of the Greek; the effect is nonetheless diluted because of its additional appearance in Pound’s second line, where it is presumably standing in for κόρη [korē] ‘girl.’ Metrically, the epigram is in elegiac couplets, each made up of a dactylic hexameter and a dactylic pentameter line. This pattern is echoed by Pound in three ways: first through a more complex duple structure in the abcdbc rhyme scheme, which alternates unrhymed lines with spondaic endings with rhymed lines with feminine endings; then through the alternation between the rising rhythm in lines 1 and 2 and the falling one in lines 3 and 4 (imitating the advance and retreat effect of the elegiac couplet), sharpened in the final couplet; where, finally, there is also an unevenness in the number of stresses, with three in line 5, as throughout, versus four in line 6.

Pound avoids the poem’s final punch – “O maiden, we shall lie bones and dust” (trans. Mackail) – that also finally unites the speaker and the woman in death. His omission is partly remedied through his ingenious combination of Asclepiades’ poem with the two-line Julianus epigram from about eight centuries later (roughly the same amount of time separating Julianus from Guido Orlandi of “Echoes I”), which allows him to turn the whole into a metapoetic statement:

The Julianus epigram gives Pound a concrete image to focus his stanza, so he doesn’t have to invent it as he did with Asclepiades in the first stanza: the dust which envelops us in death, and so metaphorically the “cloak of dust.” The second cloak – the one offered by the speaker – is absent from Julianus’s Greek, and may in fact be traced back to Asclepiades himself. The very second poem in Mackail’s Anthology is by him and centers on this precise item of clothing: “but most sweet when one cloak hides two lovers.”Footnote ¹⁷ The switch from the potentially shed and then indifferently generated rose-leaf of the first stanza to the spun robe – that is, from a natural to an artificial image (whose artificiality is emphasized through the very metaphor of the cloak of dust) – enacts the speaker’s command that the addressee look away from earthly time and its circularity. The second stanza’s tightened meter (clearly iambic, the first line a full pentameter) and rhymes both lend it a surer air and highlight its craftedness qua poetic object. The conclusion on “my eyes” added by Pound to Julianus and the replacement of the invitation to drink (an act) with the lovers’ cloak (an object, and one borrowed from another poem no less) complete such a reading.

This self-consciousness has some roots in Julianus; after all, in the untranslated first line of his epigram the speaker refers to his having sung this motto in the past and proposes to continue doing so from beyond the grave. That is, the promise of a poetic afterlife in the first line somewhat undercuts the carpe diem motif of the second (“Drink, before you put on this raiment of dust”), and especially so if Mackail is correct in suggesting that the poem was written for Anacreon, resurrecting the ancient poet’s voice almost a millennium later (even if only to re-entomb it).Footnote ¹⁸ Mackail takes pains to emphasize the significance of Julianus’s period: “At the court of Justinian, a.d. 527–565, Greek poetry made its last serious effort.”Footnote ¹⁹ So Pound revives Julianus’s Anacreontic message by embedding it into a very English poetic form, one which at the very end turns, through inversion, into a Greek one, the choriambic “Tíme than my éyes.” At the same time, the counterforce of the march of time against the poet’s efforts is felt most strongly in the very same line; the number of stresses has decreased from five to three to finally two as the poem dies out, while the inversion in the last line coupled with the consonance with “mistrust” turn “Time” into the stanza’s most prominent word.

Seen in relation to the first stanza, and to the poem as a whole, or in relation to its Greek prototypes, the second stanza of “Echoes II” emerges as a sophisticated, thoughtful effort. But on its own, it is not particularly groundbreaking poetically. In fact, it represents a retreat – calculated though it may be – from the more experimental, Greek-inflected versification of the first stanza, while even its arresting central image of the “cloak of dust” loses some its impact by being explained in the second line. But what Pound is not able to bring through here, H.D. is. As we have seen, translating from Greek, and specifically from the Anthology, had clearly been in Pound’s mind when he sent H.D.’s poems to Harriet Monroe, poems which had emerged from a pursuit very similar to his own. But H.D.’s clarity of purpose and intention and the sharpness of her language may have deterred him, and may explain his relative virulence against “hellenism” only a year later. After reading H.D.’s poems, Pound insists on the indirect, comparative route to Greek, now with a view of ultimately bypassing it altogether.

Beyond Greek: Provence, India, China

In the early imagist years Pound wavers between existing and emerging models of classicism in general and hellenism specifically. Struggling to articulate his own coherent position, he relies on others’ assessments, from Mackail’s to T. E. Hulme’s to Dora Marsden’s or Gilbert Murray’s, and trades barbs with Richard Aldington on the pages of the Egoist. At the same time, he searches for other linguistic/cultural/literary paradigms that could be used to complement or even supplant the authority and pull of Greek over English letters. Starting in late 1912 and throughout his career, Pound chooses to tackle and implicitly advocate for the use (and usefulness) of Greek through a third language and, in so doing, he reveals the necessity – and fruitfulness – of a mediated relation to Greek. Besides the staged juxtapositions in Ripostes and the special case of Latin, in the 1910s Pound cycles through three main comparative paradigms – Provençal, Bengali, and Chinese – the last of which dislodges Greek and allows him to re-found imagism on a non-Greek basis. These larger-scale assessments begin to offer Pound a way to get beyond the detail-oriented, textually comparative poetics of Ripostes and towards the more expansive, ideogrammatically arrayed “tale of the tribe.”

Even as he borrows Mackail’s terms (and H.D.’s Greek-based poems), Pound is quick to disavow the connection of imagism to Greek, writing already in 1912 that Harriet Monroe was wrong in calling the imagists “a group of ardent Hellenists”: “Imagism is concerned only with language and presentation. Hellenism & vers libre have nothing to do with it…. There is Imagism in all the best poetry of the past” (L/ACH 4). Yet, as his own work in Ripostes shows and as the comment about vers libre implies – when he himself would essentially make free verse, or at least verse that is not subject to the metronome, one of the three essential principles of imagism a few months later – Pound is in reality quite ambivalent about how exactly to connect the three terms. In an attempt to disentangle them, he pits the more straightforwardly hellenist imagism of Aldington against Hulme’s evolving ideas on the usefulness of classicism; in the end, he resists both Aldington’s too-easy admiration of classical Greece and Hulme’s condemnation of it in favor of an older, archaic “classicism.” Lacking, then, a positive model for hellenist work, he turns to other cultures.

Hulme’s 1911 lecture on “Romanticism and Classicism” provided many of imagism’s structuring oppositions: “slopp[y],” “damp” vs. “dry, hard,” “vagueness” vs. “accurate, precise and definite description,” etc., with the first term in each pair aligned with romanticism and the second with classicism.Footnote ²⁰ However, this terminological distinction between the romantic and the classic, as well as the terms in which it defined the ancient world, proved less straightforwardly influential for Pound despite his borrowing of Hulme’s vocabulary of hardness and masculinity. Already in 1910, Pound had dismissed the terms “classic” and “romantic” as “snares”; Pope’s classicism seems un-Greek, while an excerpt from Oedipus at Colonus contains “all the paraphernalia of the ‘Romantic’ school,” an assessment no doubt influenced by Richard Jebb’s translation in which he probably read it (SR 13). Hulme himself came to reject all art since the Renaissance, including its classical sources. His changed position was part of a general turn against classical and classicizing art. Scholars like James Frazer and Jane Harrison had uncovered through the study of archaic Greek religion and art “a more complex and multifaceted view of the ancient world” and thus begun to “deliberately undermin[e] the ideological, religious, and institutional foundations of classical tradition.”Footnote ²¹ Pound would mostly adopt this “primitivist” rhetoric after 1913.

When, then, in early 1914 Aldington took to the pages of the Egoist to offer a “‘pleading’ on behalf of the new unfashionable and unstudied Hellenic ideal of art,” Pound responded by echoing both Hulme’s condemnation of Greek sculpture for being representational and “humanist” and the critique of Dora Marsden, the feminist editor of the Egoist, “Concerning the Beautiful.”Footnote ²² Six months earlier, in an issue that contained Aldington’s Sapphic “To Atthis,” H.D.’s “Sitalkas,” and William Carlos Williams’s Greek-themed “Postlude,” Marsden had argued against the permanence of beauty, rhetorically linking beauty to Greek through Keats: “All that which has authoritatively been termed ‘beautiful’ may fail the purpose as likely as not, Grecian urns and all things beautiful, and Greek.”Footnote ²³ Instead, she claimed, one should define the beautiful not through its essence but through its effect: “in terms only of the thing it does, to wit, restoring coherence, oneness and composure to the soul.”Footnote ²⁴ Pound takes on exactly this rallying cry in his response to Aldington’s espousal of hellenism: “Regarding this pother about the Greeks: Some few of us are at last liberated from the idea that ‘THE BEAUTIFUL’ is the caressable, the physically attractive.”Footnote ²⁵ (Of course H.D.’s 1912 poem “Priapus,” with its refrain “spare us from loveliness,” had preceded both Marsden and Pound in its articulation of this critique.) Pound and Aldington each exaggerate their anti- and pro-hellenic stances in order to argue for what amounts to a different relation to the past. That is, the “modernist” Pound still compares Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s and Jacob Epstein’s sculptures to “the gods of the Epicureans, apart, unconcerned, unrelenting,” and calls for artists to turn “to the powers of the air … to the spirits of our ancestors,” while the “hellenist” Aldington confesses his admiration for Picasso and more modestly concludes that hellenism could be a possible incitement to production of “a few good works of art” if looked at in the right way.Footnote ²⁶ The difference between them is more in tone than in substance.

More revealing is the two writers’ informal exchange in the correspondence pages of the Egoist. In response to Aldington’s sarcastic putdown of his multifarious interests and know-it-all pretensions,Footnote ²⁷ Pound frames as an advantage the inclinations his fellow imagist mocks, arguing that the only way to get away from Victorian hellenism is through comparative work that is even broader in scope than his own undertaking in Ripostes:

Unlike his friend and ally Gaudier-Brzeska, who disavows any “relation to classic Greek,”Footnote ²⁹ Pound instead urges Aldington to begin such critical work: “do some service in defending specific Greek works from the general contempt which is beginning to be hurled upon ‘the Greek,’ the Greek ‘as a whole,’ the Paterine sentimentalesque Hellenism.”Footnote ³⁰ What Pound himself has excluded at this moment from Hulme’s and Gaudier’s outright rejection of classical Greek culture is tragedy. The genre’s redeeming qualities are its intimation of a world outside humanity’s mastery (“chaos and death and the inexplicable forces of destiny and nothingness and beyond”) and its ritualistic aspect, which makes itself felt despite tragedy’s representation of an agonistic relation between individual and objective worlds.Footnote ³¹ This remark follows the by then common view of the Dionysian aspect of tragedy, popularized through the work of Nietzsche, the maligned Pater, and Frazer. It even recalls an observation by Gilbert Murray apropos of The Bacchae: “There are in the world things not of reason…. ‘Things which Are,’ things utterly non-human and non-moral, which bring man bliss or tear his life to shreds without a break in their own serenity.”Footnote ³² Pound’s ambivalence about Greek and its usefulness remains evident as he alternately parrots Hulme or Murray, two of the prevailing and to some extent opposing opinions of his time; he is able to articulate his own nascent mode of approach only in response to Aldington’s calculated jeering.

For Aldington too is in the end interested in pursuing a comparative approach; he tackles neo-Latin poetry in his 1916 contribution to the Poets’ Translation Series even though he had rejected it for its lack of simplicity in his hellenism debate with Pound in 1914.Footnote ³³ Like Pound in what became Canto 1 (originally composed in late 1915), he wants to transmit a Renaissance emotion of discovery through his translation of pastoral epigrams by Marco Antonio Flaminio: “In reading these poems, you must try to imagine the enthusiasm of that earlier age for Hellenism,” an excitement which in Flaminio coexisted with “the stifling folds of academic imitation,” but has since been fully muted by academic study.Footnote ³⁴ Aldington’s recovery of this “side-track which led nowhere” would thus reorient his own contemporaries’ response to the classical tradition, steering it away from pedantry and towards “genuine poetry.”Footnote ³⁵ Like Pound in the first canto but also in his Greek-inspired poems in Lustra (see below), Aldington suggests that in order to get rid of philology you have to go through it. But while Aldington ultimately wants to get back through his English, through Latin, to the “more alive, more essential, more human” Greek, Pound ends up seeking and celebrating the opposite movement: “out of Homer.”Footnote ³⁶

In a 1913 essay titled “The Tradition,” Pound attempts to disentangle his interest in “the sapphic affair” from the general praise (or disdain) of things Greek by specifying the exact contribution of Greek poetics to the English model he was trying to establish. Rather than imagistic “straightness,” he now focuses on sound. He advocates for the interrelation between poetry and music that characterized both the Greek and Provençal lyric traditions as a reflection of a kind of universal harmony: “The man who returns to origins does so because he wishes … not pedagogy but harmony, the fitting thing” (LE 92). Linking a poetic institution to something like a moral order, Pound, ironically, comes close to Matthew Arnold; like Arnold, what he finds lacking and what “a return to origins” ought to restore is the right measure, something that makes “nature and reason” cohere (92). And yet, unlike for Arnold, for Pound, perhaps on the basis of his own experience, there is no guarantee that one will be able to transpose or reproduce the “fitting thing,” especially if it is so tied to the close relation between verse and music. As Pound would later write, “the melopoeia can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear, even though he be ignorant of the language in which the poem is written”; it is, however, “practically impossible to transfer or translate it from one language to another, save perhaps by divine accident, and for half a line at a time” (LE 25). If, then, “the maximum of melopoeia is reached in Greek,” it would seem that an actual poetic hellenism would be all but impossible (ABCR 42).Footnote ³⁷ Even right after H.D.’s successful “versions” from the Anthology, Pound bemoans that “most English translations are hopeless,” and recommends Mackail’s prose (L 87). Writing to a young Mary Barnard in December 1933, he reveals how closely interwoven these strands remain in his thinking: “dig in DEEPER in greek, with a bit of Provençal,” he advises, and specifically encourages her to “Get a metronome and learn HOW long the different syllables, and groups of them take.” He also warns her not to tell others that this is what she is doing lest they smear the “NEXT ‘movement.’”Footnote ³⁸ Metrical experimentation with Greek is on the one hand implicitly distinguished from imagism (no vers libre here), but on the other, clearly aligned with it qua movement pried away from Pound by the “hellenists.”

The sense already in the fall of 1912 that Aldington and H.D. were “claiming” Greek away may be what prompted Pound to pursue another comparison, more short-lived than that with Provençal, yet still revealing in terms of Pound’s attitude towards Greek. At that time Pound met through Yeats the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore; in October, Pound reported that they had spent the two previous evenings discussing “prosody” (L/DS 162). Pound builds up Tagore’s poetry even though he cannot read it and can experience its music only separately from its signifying words. He proclaims Bengali “an ideal language for poets” because “it is fluid, and the order is flexible, and all this makes for precision … since you can have a specific word for everything.”Footnote ³⁹ He thus finds in Bengali grammar what he would soon discover in the Chinese character and elevate into a principle of poetic construction: the possibility of doing a montage of different parts, be they words, lines, or historical periods, and of thus allowing a composite, but completely new whole to emerge – a whole, moreover, that is not general, abstract, or vague, but precisely and visibly articulated and still more or other than the sum of its parts. (An early attempt at such a thing was of course Ripostes’ “Echoes.”) Yet, as Pound himself notes, Bengali shares the two features that make for its precision – namely, inflection and capacity for word-combination, and, therefore, for neologisms – with Greek.Footnote ⁴⁰ At the same time, like Provençal and Greek lyrics, Tagore’s poems “are all songs to sing. The tunes and the words are knit together”; moreover, he adds, “no separate poem or song can seem a scrap or a disconnected performance, but must seem a part of the whole order of song and life.”Footnote ⁴¹ These are not self-contained poems but ones pointing to and including a world and a context outside them. Calling, then, Tagore “our new Greece,” Pound goes so far as to claim that “this beginning of our more intimate intercourse with Bengal is the opening of another period” similar to that inaugurated by the turn to Greek in the Renaissance.Footnote ⁴²

Pound both relies on the authority of Greek to justify his interest in Tagore and uses him to undercut that authority. Tagore’s “Greece” is new on the one hand because Pound presents it as re-conceptualized through Provence, and on the other because it also represents for him (Pound) a supersession of the Western legacy of Greece, of the dominant kind of hellenism. That is, though Tagore is hellenic in the linguistic and musical form of his poems and recalls Sappho and Theocritus, he is not so in their content, and especially not in what concerns humans’ place in the world: “There is in him the stillness of nature…. It is in contrast to the Hellenic representation of man the sport of the gods, and both in the grip of destiny.”Footnote ⁴³ Pound sees Tagore, this new Greece he is supposed to represent, as refreshment from the tired humanism that the previous Greek refreshment had brought into being. And yet it is also clear that, through this comparison with the Bengali poet, he is trying to dissociate what he sees as the virtues of Greek as a poetic language from the use to which these have previously been put – or, more accurately, to dissociate Greek poetry, with its particular textual merits and difficulties, from the total cultural representation Greece stood for in the wake of Winckelmann, and so perhaps to claim a different, a more particular Greek legacy for his poetry than the one that the West had claimed.

But Tagore – Pound’s first foray eastwards in the hopes of a new Renaissance – is quickly supplanted by Ernest Fenollosa. By mid-1917, this is explicit: “Fenollosa has given us more than Tagore has.”Footnote ⁴⁴ What Fenollosa has given Pound, in the case of Chinese especially, is precisely the system that he had been looking for in Greek. Since Fenollosa sees a homology between the structure of the Chinese language and nature – such that Chinese poetry would be by default mimetic or iconic, without even the recourse to the musical required by Tagore’s Bengali – he offers Pound a visual, truly “imagiste,” model for the “fitting thing.” He allows Pound to re-conceptualize the “luminous detail” into the image qua “radiant node or cluster … a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” and turn the anti-philological “method of scholarship” adumbrated in 1911’s “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” into a method of poetic writing (GB 92).

Indeed, by promising linguistic transparency, an ideal of translatability between world and language, Fenollosan imagism also “solves” the problem of translation. Unlike the ambiguous “as” that characterized for Pound the relationship between H.D.’s poems and their Greek originals in the first articulation of imagism, this later theory of imagism expounded in “Affirmations: As for Imagisme” (1915) and in Gaudier-Brzeska (1916) is articulated more clearly as a theory of translation that applies first to the composition of the poem itself, and then also facilitates its “translation proper.” Pound lays out two options: The poet either captures the moment “when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” or, conversely, the image may be produced when “emotion seizing up some external scene or action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original” (GB 89; SP 375). In the first case, the image-poem is able to record the precise relation between outside and inside, providing a full, complex picture and leaving no remainder. The modified theory of mimesis articulated in the second case offers a necessary supplement, ensuring the “impersonality” of the poem and helping distinguish Pound’s previous emphasis on agency and emotion from the mushy subjectivism he was trying to avoid; “faces in the crowd” are a ghostly “apparition” only momentarily before setting into the objective solidity of “petals on a wet, black bough.” At the same time, Pound’s frequent rhetoric of purging and cleanliness emerges here as a method of radical translation, whereby “the external original” becomes more like itself through the poet’s decontamination. When it comes to further transmitting these translational poems by interlingual translation, the prospective translator is in luck. Unlike the “melopoeia” of Greek and Provençal, “phanopoeia” is eminently translatable since it doesn’t depend on the arrangement of specific words: “When it is good enough, it is practically impossible for the translator to destroy it” (LE 25). Pound’s understanding of the new mode of writing poetry therefore becomes an essentially reductive, or reducing one. He mythologizes the birth of the imagist poem as a laborious process of slashing: going against words for the sake of finding the right ones, which themselves would have to disappear or recede as the image, or “the word beyond formulated language,” shines through (GB 88).Footnote ⁴⁵ But – in what will be one of this book’s themes – the excised logoi always return, and especially the Greek ones.

Greek, Reduced

Pound’s next set of Greek-inspired poems, collected in Lustra (1916–17), is markedly different from the experimentation visible in Ripostes, and aims at exactly this kind of imagist transparency. Though the same type of Greek ur-texts are used – Sappho and the Greek Anthology – each has been reduced to its presumed essence, “purge[d] … of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities,” and there is not the same attempt to approach them in their specific complexities. That is, the textual engagement is intentionally distant, and, at the same time, the historical footing or context of transmission – the set of “relations [which] are more real and more important than the things which they relate”Footnote ⁴⁶ – is more prominent. The poems are brief but mostly narrative, their language is colloquial and direct, eschewing syntactical convolutions, and the tone, with the exception of the two Sappho translations, trenchantly mocking. (And this is very much in contrast to the more melancholic tone and image-based composition of Lustra’s Chinese-inspired poems.)

The intentional shift in approach is already suggested by the paired poems “The Faun” and “Tempora” (both published in Poetry and Drama in March 1914), playfully aimed at establishing Pound’s dominance over the other “hellenists” by dismissing their endeavors. The first is a light reprimand of Aldington (nicknamed the faun) for “sniffing and snoozling about among my flowers” (the Anthology and, presumably, H.D. herself as Pound’s former fiancée) ending with a “Δώρια”-like address to the winds Auster and Apeliota (P&T 287).Footnote ⁴⁷ The second is a clear mockery of H.D. “Io! Io! Tamuz!,” it opens, before translating the “plaintive, querulous crying” of “The Dryad” (H.D.’s nickname) into contemporary English: “Oh, no, she is not crying: ‘Tamuz.’ / She says, ‘May my poems be printed this week?’” (P&T 288). In both cases Pound uses Greek references to put himself in a position of power over the others, reminding H.D. especially of her reliance on him for publication. His preference for the satirical, direct epigram is “explained” in the metapoetic “The Three Poets” (first pub. Poetry, September 1916):

This is a rejection both of genre – no classical (or classicizing) elegy akin to the Dryad’s faux lament, no medieval or Renaissance sonnet – and of mode of presentation. The poem’s subject ought neither to be masked and expressed in clichés nor to be allegorized (as, e.g., by Pound in “The Faun”), but stated plainly, directly – indeed, candidly. The woman’s name is doubtlessly not an accidental choice, with its associations with both truth/honesty and brilliance/luminosity, elements so central to Fenollosan imagist aesthetics.

In general, the poems published, and presumably written, earlier – for example, the four-part sequence “Ladies” (Poetry, August 1914), “Phyllidula” and “The Patterns” (Others, November 1915), and “Epitaph” (Smart Set, December 1913) – evoke the Greek Anthology through their brevity, wryness, and misogyny. Though some include Greek names and develop Anthological motifs, they do not cite, directly translate, or adapt particular epigrams.Footnote ⁴⁸ For example, the first “Ladies” poem is titled “Agathas” and speaks of a woman of this name who once spurned many lovers but now “turns to me seeking love, / And her hair is also turning,” while “Patterns” compares Erinna who “is a model parent, / Her children have never discovered her adulteries” to Lalage, “also a model parent, / Her offspring are fat and happy” (P&T 281, 282). These poems seem to belong to an intermediate stage, on par with Pound’s “anti-hellenist” prose pronouncements in the Egoist; he is rejecting his earlier, fastidious Greek work but has not yet figured out a new way of approach.

The focus changes in the poems written in 1916 as Pound’s interest in the history of textual transmission develops. This work most clearly showcases imagist poetry of the first kind, displaying the full relations between things “subjective” – in this case, texts or emotions appropriated or interpreted at different points in time – and “objective” (particular existing texts). “Homage to Quintus Septimius Florentis Christianus (Ex libris Graeca),” first published in Poetry in September 1916, and placed near the end of Lustra, three poems before the “Three Cantos of a Poem of Some Length,” consists of six short poems. All but the first (by Simonides; Loeb 10.105)Footnote ⁴⁹ and last are identified by their Greek authors: ii is by Anyte (Loeb 9.144), iii and v by Palladas (Loeb 10.59 and 11.381), iv is titled “Troy” and is by Agath[i]as Scholasticus (Loeb 9.153). Poem vi is titled “Nicarchus upon Phidon his doctor,” and is attributed to Callicter in the Loeb (11.118) but not in Pound’s source. All poems, as the sequence title suggests, are translated from the Latin of the French scholar Florent Chrétien, whose edition of the Anthology was published in 1608.Footnote ⁵⁰ This suggests another reason for the choice of “Candidia,” a Latinate name, in “Three Poets”: “straight as the Greek” now means “through Latin,” its relation to this first receiving language and sensibility necessarily registered. The Chrétien sequence combines both the technique used in the Divus canto, marking in this case the late Renaissance reception of Greek lyric rather than the early one of epic, and the “Homage” technique to be perfected in Homage to Sextus Propertius. It is a rearranged combination of lyrics that reflects on the writing of the past, has a distinctly mordant tone, and includes provocatively playful translations of the kind that would be criticized in Propertius. We read, for example, of “barbecues of great oxen,” of Troy’s “profits” (Pound translating moenera rather than moenia [τείχεα] ‘walls’), and of the “inane expenses of the funeral” (P&T 314; for the Latin “lucri funus inane”).Footnote ⁵¹

Given the selection of these particular poets, it is clear that Pound is once again tracing the history of the Greek lyric tradition, as gathered in the Anthology – the series of “subjective” reworkings that make it up. His overview is almost perfectly balanced temporally: from Simonides (556–467 bce) – of whom Mackail writes, “Beyond the point to which Simonides brought it the epigram never rose” – to the Christian historian, poet, and anthologist Agathias (532?–580? ce), who was probably the first to have arranged the collection’s poems by subject and who is thus responsible for the Anthology’s modern-day form.Footnote ⁵² The intermediate stops are Anyte (third century bce), “the woman Homer” of the second flowering of Greek lyric in the Hellenistic period and an H.D. and Aldington favorite, and the Alexandrian schoolmaster Palladas of the fourth/fifth centuries ce, who is “one of the last of the purely pagan world.”Footnote ⁵³ Pound goes back in time to end with “Nicarchus,” whom Chrétien identifies as an Alexandrian of the first century ce – that is, placing him exactly at the beginning of the modern era. It is as if Pound is seeking a new (old) beginning, restarting not just the modern era by re-accessing Greek through Chrétien’s Latin, but also, punningly, the “Christian” era itself.

The main motif in the selection is the inescapability and permanence of death:

A secondary theme is femininity, tied either to art/religion as in ii (at Aphrodite’s “place,” “the sailors are cheered, and the waves / Keep small with reverence, beholding her image”), or to death as in v (a woman pleases only when “dead, or asleep”), or to both as in iv: “Whither, O city, are your … gilded shrines / … / And the tall women walking your streets, in gilt clothes/ … / Where is the work of your home-born sculptors?” (P&T 313–14). Yet, just as what is left of Troy in iv is “your douth and your story,” the Greek tradition, despite all its protestations that death is death, is made to speak clearly and directly from beyond the grave, like Julianus’s Anacreon or Phidon’s patient – and unlike in “Echoes ii,” this time in colloquial English (with the pointed and apt exception of “douth” itself, Pound’s translation of that antique value of kleos ‘fame, glory’). Its meters and its very words avoided through Latin, Greece is like Palladas’s woman: “dead or asleep, she pleases.”

Such a framework allows us to better understand Pound’s versions of Sappho in Lustra: the four-word “Papyrus” (“Spring … / Too long … / Gongula …”; Pound’s ellipses, P&T 289), based on Fragment 95, and the slightly longer “Ἱμέρρω,”Footnote ⁵⁴ based on Fragment 96 and originally published as “O Atthis” in Poetry in September 1916 together with the “Homage” to Chrétien and the manifesto-like “Three Poets.” If the Greek Anthology is distilled into wry pragmatism, Sappho becomes central to what Kenner calls a “poiesis of loss.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Certainly Pound had many one-line excerpts or newly discovered fragmentary poems of Sappho to choose from. What he does instead is further reduce poems that are actually much longer. That is, these Sappho poems are an aesthetic gesture: a condensation or purging even of the Greek poet most condensed by historical contingency. Like Pound’s Homer in Canto 1 and like the “Homage,” moreover, they are both mediated by a third hand, marking again a context of relations: “Ἱμέρρω” by Aldington, who had first translated Fr. 96 in 1912, and “Papyrus” by the scholar J. M. Edmonds, who longingly created a poem out of sole letters that are no longer read. For “Papyrus” translates the tentatively reconstructed opening of Fr. 95; this reconstruction has by now been rejected, and since it is no longer classed as readable, it is usually not printed, turning Pound’s poem into a “translation with no original.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, “Ἱμέρρω” is much indebted to Aldington’s “To Atthis” (in whose publication Pound was very involved), following both its readings and its errors.Footnote ⁵⁷

Even though Pound reduces them to a lyric utterance, both Sappho poems are quite substantial and complex in ways that should interest him. But choosing to start Sappho 96 at lines 15–16 – not coincidentally, the point at which the gaps in the parchment begin and Aldington’s translation fades into ellipses – he erases Sappho’s contestation of epic, as signaled through a Homeric simile in which she memorably calls the moon rosy-fingered. Pound would recall Sappho’s dialectal βροδοδάκτυλος [brododaktylos] specifically – rather than the Homeric version ῥοδοδάκτυλος [rhododaktylos] – in the Pisan Cantos (80/531), suggesting that he noticed and intentionally ignored it in 1916. He also suppresses Sappho’s evocation of the world of the sea and the suggestion of the protagonist’s exile – again, motifs that are everywhere in Pound’s work, especially at this time. The same could be said about “Papyrus”: In Fragment 95, Sappho has a vision of death and the underworld, much like Odysseus in Book 11. Instead Pound cuts off the poem just as it builds up. Though his “Papyrus” grows from one to two to three syllables, its words and stresses increase to two in the middle line only to go back to one in the third; even the sounds of the third line, with the exception of the final a, perfectly repeat those of the second. Gongula, and Sappho’s “papyrus” (actually parchment) appear only to disappear in these five words, offering a much-reduced version of the six-stanza “Apparuit.” For Pound, then, Sappho must be a figure of loss, perhaps of his own loss.Footnote ⁵⁸ After the inimitable Sapphic melopoeia, it seems more convenient to code Sappho as lyric absence – “dead or asleep, she pleases.” Indeed, in Pound’s “Hellenist Series,” published two years later in the Egoist, Sappho is sandwiched between three long sections on Homer and two on Aeschylus; the brief installment devoted to her comprises almost entirely unearthed translations of her “Ode to Aphrodite” (Fragment 1) into English (1910) and Spanish (1832), with very little critical prose. The ground of lyric has been ceded, even as the newly developing Cantos may be said to operate as a “largely uncaptioned [A]nthology.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Chattering Greek(s): Hermes, Priapus, Homonoea

H.D. praises Meleager not only as the first anthologist and as a formally ingenious poet but also as the one responsible for a third innovation: the inclusion of women in his anthology and, what is more, the decision to open the Garland’s introductory poem with women poets.Footnote ⁶⁶ The first of these is Anyte of Tegea, an Arcadian poet who flourished in the early third century bce and whom Mackail places at the end of “pure Hellenism.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Anyte is precisely the poet that H.D. also begins with in 1912, turning one of her epigrams into “Hermes of the Ways.” Pound and Aldington would soon follow her: the former in the second poem of “Homage,” as we have seen, the latter by translating Anyte’s slim corpus in 1915.

H.D. borrows from Anyte’s epigram the image of the triple crossroads and of the three landscape elements specified: the orchard, the grey sea-shore, and the fountain of cold water. The closest she comes to a translation of Anyte’s poem is in the fourth stanza of her poem’s first part, where she gives us all of the elements of the Greek poem with the exception of the fountain:

Most of the rest of H.D.’s poem is an exploration of Anyte’s first two lines: the image of Hermes in a landscape both pastoral and marine. Though the orchard is not specified as a “sea-orchard,” but only as a windy one, H.D. realizes the contrast that is implied in the Greek and merges the two. She does not, however, maintain the title (“The Orchard-Corner”) assigned by Mackail to Anyte’s poem; instead, she chooses to borrow that of another epigram by an unknown author.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the Greek poem that Mackail has titled “Hermes of the Ways” the landscape is even less specific: a shady juniper tree and a fountain under a rock. What might explain this title switch is that, unlike in Anyte, H.D.’s speaker does not assume the persona of Hermes; instead, in the first section of the poem Hermes is presented in the third person, as he is in the anonymous poem, while in the second section, it is he and not the weary traveler who is addressed. In fact H.D. makes no mention of the traveler to whom Hermes or this landscape might offer respite. Though she writes that Hermes is “welcoming wayfarers,” in the next few lines we learn that he is sheltered on the west by the sea-orchard. Rather than provide shelter, that is, Hermes himself is hidden and protected by (and from) a landscape that, as we see from what happens to the poem’s speaker, is not a place of comfort but of exposure and violence. H.D. thus substitutes for the discursive appearance of a god his absence – and, if we take this poem as an index for her relationship to Greece, we may say she substitutes for an image of Greece and Greek texts as (to borrow from Aldington’s translation) “a stainless spring” that is “a resting-place for weary men,” an uncertain foray into shifting ground.Footnote ⁷⁰

Hermes nonetheless remains the poem’s main image, its gathering force, as the poet intuits what the landscape hides:

Hermes, as the title indicates, is the focal point, yet he is not. He is “dubious” – whether in essence or in appearance at that moment remains dubious itself – and scattered (“facing three ways”), known then only in his unknowability. Hermes is not portrayed here in his usual capacity as the Greek messenger god – a persona that might have been fitting for a poetic adaptation of an old epigram. Instead, his divine trait, his transitivity, is embodied in the transitional, ever-changing land- and sea-scape, while Hermes himself is presented as oddly stationary.Footnote ⁷¹ As the one who waits for and welcomes wayfarers, Hermes’ “activity” is a passivity, or at least a receptivity. By emphasizing that he is Hermes “of the triple path-ways,” H.D. does not only point to his literal position in the space of her poem, but also recalls the Greek Hermes’ double, the Neoplatonic Hermes Trismegistos, aligned with Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, learning, and wisdom.Footnote ⁷² In the poem’s first two publications, H.D. uses the archaic “Awaiteth” instead of “awaits,” giving up the near-rhyme with “ways” in order to convey sonically the god’s other name and other provenance: Hermes of the “triple path-ways” who “Awaiteth,” Thoth. Approaching Greece via a third-century Hellenistic poet, and broaching the other side of Alexandrian Hellenism, namely Egypt, H.D. signals already in this, her very first published poem, that her hellenism would eschew the at the time more dominant classical hellenizing trends, for the sake of drawing out the link between Greece and the occult, Greece and ritual.Footnote ⁷³ Rejecting a straight line from antiquity to the present, H.D., through her poem of double origins, and her god of double provenance, shows already her interest in anachronism and syncretism.

In creating not a fragmented poem, but a whole out of two fragments sown together, and using one to determine her reading of the other, H.D. reflects or even anticipates Pound’s own translation and composition method; it is not surprising that he would have responded well to such a poem. Yet one of the main features of this poem praised for its directness is its consistent resorting to periphrastic constructions, as seen in the first two stanzas:

Phrases like “And the grains of it,” “Far off over the leagues of it,” “But the shadow of them” would have been more direct and concise had H.D. opted for the possessive adjective. Obviously H.D., like Pound in the final couplet of the other “first” imagist poem, the repudiated “Middle-Aged,”Footnote ⁷⁴ uses this construction for the sake of establishing a kind of rhyme, both acoustic and structural. Unlike in “Middle-Aged,” which expounds the in-the-end ambiguous “it” in the poem’s first line (“’Tis but a vague, invarious delight”), H.D.’s neutral personal pronoun does have a clear antecedent, “the hard sand.” Yet its echoing in prepositional constructions throughout the poem’s first stanzas suggests the speaker’s inability to define or pin down this element’s essence. The repetitions of “of” and “it” thus present us with the fragmentation and incompletion of what we thought had been defined as “hard sand.” The poem becomes increasingly structured around a circular repetition of clauses, indicating an absence of transparency:

Every word needs to be qualified, further broken down, or elucidated – needs to be made more precise. Paradoxically, that is, we find two of the imagist precepts in contradiction: the drive for directness and precision leads precisely to the absence of verbal economy.

Pound’s much-praised compound words of Greek and Bengali appear in full force in H.D.’s English, also in the service of precision (“many-foamed ways,” “sea-orchard,” “sea-wind,” “salt-crusted grass,” “sea-mist,” “sea-grass,” “shore-grass”). What they designate is again the imprecise, a landscape which is blurred and in-between and therefore resists description: indeed, “many-foamed.” As H.D. circles around, revisits and revises her image – the landscape she imagines, as well as the image that is the Greek epigram(s) – her English poem stutters, since the demand to render each emotion or motion with the right word is haunted by the inability to say anything at all. The second part of the poem offers us two such images of stifled, stunted, or useless growth: the apples “hard, / too small, / too late ripened / by a desperate sun” and the baffled (presumably in the sense of “restrained”) boughs. Is the speaker projecting her own sense of untimeliness and confusion onto the earthly landscape? Or is she perhaps uncovering their shared feature? Not only the speaker, but also the sun itself – often associated with Apollo, the god of poetry, in H.D.’s poems – is powerless, “desperate,” and “struggles through sea-mist.”

At the same time, however, this “excess” or repetition that is both grammatical and semantic is what holds the poem together. H.D.’s prosody is based on the rhythm established by syntactic and phrasal repetition and periphrasis and is supplemented by those devices’ sonic counterparts: assonance and alliteration. For example, in the lines “and the great waves / break over it,” adjective, noun, and verb all contain the same phoneme, and are also similar structurally, “break” following “great” (b/g+r) and “over,” “waves.” Moreover, beginning with her third line, H.D. sets up an alliteration of w: “wine” becomes “wind,” then turns into “ways” and finally “awaits.” Anyte’s poem also makes use of a similar device, ending on an alliterative note, with three repetitions of χ coupled with ρ in her last line (ψυχρὸν ἀχραὲς προχέει [psychron achraes procheei]), which echo back to the poem’s crucial word ὄρχατον (orchaton, orchard) in the first. The tightly knit sonic structuring of H.D.’s poem, in which one word blurs with another, will become a consistent strategy in her writing; here it corresponds sonically to the visual impression of the landscape on the speaker, offered through the numerous compound words. In the two lines quoted above, for instance, H.D. uses four consecutive stressed syllables, all of which demand equal stress precisely because of the pause offered by the line break between “waves” and “breaks.” She performs on the level of sound what the poem describes: the inability to discriminate, one monosyllable from another, sea (wave) from land (sand).

The poem is written in the present tense; we follow the speaker as she experiences the space in which she has found herself. By the end of the first section she has entered into a kind of conversation with the landscape:

As the wind’s rushing elicits the grass’s “answer,” so that “answer” – namely the whipping of the speaker’s ankles – in turn provokes another one, the exclamation “Heu.” The second section, still in the present tense, is nonetheless riddled with past participles (“shaded,” “ripened,” “twisted” twice, “leafed,” “torn,” even “desperate” [etymologically]), most of which, moreover, semantically record the irreversible passage of time. When we reach the final stanza, which, like the last stanza of the first section, begins with an exclamation, the speaker herself has experienced such a temporal transition, as though she has been exiled from this world:

The poem’s final action is narrated in the past tense, used for the first time, as we are transported to a new present of utterance. The cry for Hermes is a response to the sea’s speech, to its threat to swallow the speaker. This distance, temporal and perhaps spatial, is what allows the speaker to speak to Hermes for the first time and to locate him in time and in relation to her speaking present. He is no longer “Hermes, / who awaits” in the eternal present, but is addressed as you and thus constituted through this dialogue; the present perfect, also employed here for the first time, forges the relationship between past and present.Footnote ⁷⁵ The poem thus dramatizes in a sense the birth of the modern(ist) poet, whipped by the Greek landscape into a sense of her own time (evidenced in the second part of the poem) and almost consumed by it before finding her own voice and her own mode of relating to it – which is Hermes, this personal Hermes of the ways, this poem. Hermes of the triple path-ways, holding himself still between the gnashing sea and whipping grass (the “but” that introduces the last clause clearly signals that his standing is in opposition or resistance to the violence that has just been described), tangled between Greek and English – as though the poem, the speech can only emerge from such a tangling.

In “Hermes of the Ways” H.D. uses Hermes to suggest that the origin of poetic speech might lie not in transit or action but in the “passivity” of waiting between extremes, and between times, while listening to the “speech” of both. The following poem in the series is another address to a god – “Priapus, Keeper-of-Orchards” – and also hides a surprising twist. It is easy to see why the Greek poem by Zonas, with its imagistic detail and precise syntactic articulation, might have appealed to both H.D. and Pound; it even appears transcribed in Greek in Aldington’s 1911–13 notebook.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Mackail’s translation it reads:

The first four of the epigram’s six lines comprise a series of adjectives and nouns, listing the various fruits being offered – that is, the direct object. The fifth is dedicated to the fruit’s equally adjective-laden recipient Priapus, the god of fertility and protector of orchards, while in the sixth we finally get the subject and verb, plus an object complement. The first four lines, moreover, are internally structured by parallelism. The first line is split between two fruits that are ἀρτι- (arti- ‘fresh-’) – even the second constituents of these compound adjectives differ only in their vowels (artichanē and artichnoun) – while each of the following three lines is devoted to a different fruit: Those in lines 2 and 4 are qualified by two adjectives, the one in 3 (grape, perhaps significantly) by three. In the poem’s mere six lines Zonas manages to use nine compound words, many of them hapax legomena. Upon seeing this Greek poem, we might conclude that H.D. looks for epigrams that lend themselves to “translation” or reworking into the kind of poetry she wants to write: epigrams, for example, whose formal structuring is not solely dependent on their meter. Yet the poem she produces on the basis of Zonas is much more complex.

The Greek epigram’s key word is the thrice-repeated arti-. It is key because it determines the poet’s conception of time. Arti is an adverb that can be used with present, past, and future tenses to indicate something that has just now happened, is about to happen, or is happening. In the poem it forms the first component of three compound words, artichanē, artichnoun, and artidoron, to suggest just-completed natural processes. Mackail translates arti with “fresh” – “fresh-cloven,” “fresh-downed,” and “fresh-stripped” – to emphasize precisely the crispness, the high quality of the offered fruit. H.D. in contrast translates the word as “late” and “already.” Rather than highlight the just-nowness, she highlights the pastness, creating the impression of fruit that is past its time, and its prime, an impression reinforced by her other lexical choices such as “fallen,” “stripped,” “broken,” and “shrunken.” This sense of lateness or delay is mirrored in the way that H.D. handles her Greek original: She does not even get to the “proper” translation of Zonas’s epigram until her last stanza. All of the words cited above appear in that stanza; nevertheless, her decision on the meaning of arti silently guides the entire poem. Already in the very second line a pear “fell.”

But why this shift, semantic and performative, of the poem’s emphasis? Why have a three-stanza long introduction to the Greek epigram? First, it is worth noting that in “Priapus” H.D. inserts a first-person speaker rather than take it out as she does in “Hermes”; in Greek, the speaker refers to himself in the third person, as karpophylax (keeper of the fruit). It is this distraught first-person speaker’s reception of the falling pear that concludes with Zonas’s poem:

Contrasting herself with the “honey-seeking, golden-banded … yellow swarm” of bees who “paused not” and seem to respond instinctively to the just-fallen fruit, “The air thunder[ing] their song,” the speaker seems unable to appreciate or use this gift: “I alone fell prostrate,” she repeats.Footnote ⁷⁸ H.D.’s “I” does not try to propitiate the orchard god through a sacrificial offering of fruit in order to ensure, as presumably is the case in the Greek poem, that the orchard will produce more fruit in the future. On the contrary, she appeals to the god as “rough-hewn” and “unbeautiful,” and offering him the overripe, unbeautiful fruit – the “fallen hazel-nuts,” the “pomegranates already broken,” the “shrunken figs” – begs him to “spare us the beauty / Of fruit-trees!” and thus, again and now more confidently dropping the parentheses, to “spare us from loveliness” (CP 27).

The fact that in the poem the “fruit” that falls and is “used” too late is, performatively, the actual translation of the Greek epigram coming at the very end, suggests that the entire poem may be a meditation on the poet’s relation to antiquity. “Loveliness” itself has particular resonances in Romantic hellenism. Keats’s “Dedication” to Leigh Hunt opens with the statement that “Glory and loveliness have passed away” and proceeds to elaborate on that passing as precisely the absence of mythology/Greece.Footnote ⁷⁹ Endymion famously opens on that loveliness, which is, moreover, ever-growing: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases” (lines 1–2). The poem then continues aligning the poet’s song with natural processes that are, as presumably in the original Zonas epigram, “just” completed and thus fresh, and new. Keats speaks of “each pleasant scene” as “growing fresh before me,” so that “I will begin / … / Now while the early budders are just new,” while “as the year / Grows lush in juicy stalks, I’ll smoothly steer / … / With streams that deepen freshly into bowers” (quoting from lines 37–48, my emphasis throughout). Bees also make an appearance. Unlike in H.D., they are in league with the poet, serving as his timekeeper: “ere the bees / Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, / I must be near the middle of my story” (lines 51–53). In rewriting Zonas, then, H.D. is also rewriting Keats, and the particular relationship to Greek antiquity imagined by Romantic hellenism.Footnote ⁸⁰ Unlike Keats’s, H.D.’s Greece isn’t a permanent, or at least infinitely renewable resource, an origin always accessible just by virtue of “The very music of the name” going into one’s “being” (“Endymion,” lines 36–37), but a potentially harmful, rotten, already used-up fruit.

H.D. presents the Greek, her source and inspiration, only after a narrative context has been created for it, only after another, separate voice, a new “I” has been produced. She then introduces the epigram at the end, having first twisted it out of its presumably intended meaning; she even reverses the order of the offered fruits in her translation stanza, from pomegranate–quince–fig–grape–nut in Greek to hazelnuts–grapes–pomegranates–figs–quinces. Significantly, the context in which she places the poem reflects, in this case, the violence inflicted by this excess of beauty (“you have flayed us / with your blossoms”), the threat it poses to one’s ability to sing (hence the contrast with the bees), or do anything other than “f[a]ll prostrate.” As in her poem the speaker finally decides to use the fallen fruit as a sacrificial offering to stop its future production, so H.D. uses Zonas – but an interpreted, reversed, altered Zonas – to indicate to us what an alternative hellenism might be: a hellenism that would turn away from the perceived Greek loveliness as the poet herself distorts or exceeds the imagistic loveliness of this very source poem in order to give herself a voice.

The place of “Hermes,” or of the orchard devoid of loveliness, is thus one from which ‘Ομόνοια (Homonoia, Homonoea) ‘order, unity, same-mindedness’ is lacking.Footnote ⁸¹ In the third poem of the series, the one that is more conventionally a translation and for this reason marked “(After the Greek),” H.D.’s speaker’s wish in “Priapus” seems to have been granted. It is perhaps no accident that it laments the death of a woman by that name.

Unlike “Hermes of the Ways,” and “Priapus,” this poem – the only one not to have been included in Sea Garden – is both more bare than the original Greek, and more repetitive.Footnote ⁸³ H.D.’s translation places less emphasis on Homonoea’s different attributes, focusing instead, through the proper-name word-rhyme, on the loss of the one presumably commissioning this epitaph the fittingly named Atimetus (one without timē ‘honor’). She thus undoes the convention of the funerary inscription by again manipulating the speaker. Unlike in the Greek, here Homonoea does not speak from the dead on her (fictional) tombstone; there is no I. Rather, H.D. reveals what such epitaphs hide and try to restitute, namely the feeling of loss experienced by the person commissioning the inscription.

In contrast to the richness of description in the Greek, H.D.’s Homonoea seems, perhaps appropriately, absent from the poem. She is identified metaphorically (golden, swallow) and referred to Atimetus (and death) in the second and fifth lines, while her only actual quality to be remembered comes in the fourth line: her chattering (though here again she is “dear,” implying a relationship to the speaker or writer of the poem). At the same time, her name’s prominent vowel, the o, echoes throughout H.D.’s elliptical description (“golden,” “beloved,” “swallow”), as does its central sound on: We find it, with slight variation, three times in the first line (“golden one,” “gone”), then in the name itself at the end of the third line, right in the middle of the poem, and again in “gone” in the fourth line. To the extent that we hear Homonoea, then, we hear her as “gone.” This stands in direct contrast with the attribute H.D. chooses to focus on, which makes her absence more poignant. Homonoea alive is not an image of beauty, compared to and found more beautiful than Aphrodite (as in Greek), which can be remembered after death, but is turned into a chattering bird; her essence thus seems to be precisely the fleetingness of her speech and presence.

In the same way that we have an echo of Homonoea, but no assertion of presence (as we do in Greek with keimai ‘I lie’), so in her “chattering” we have an echo of her language, and of H.D.’s original. H.D. takes out the comparisons the Greek makes between Homonoea, the Sirens, and Aphrodite (ligyrōterē ‘clearer-voiced,’ chrysoterē ‘more golden’), but she maintains their grammatical sound since the comparative suffix -terē survives in the “-terer” of “chatterer.” “Beloved” in turn echoes the phonemes of two Greek words, one which it translates in meaning (φιλίην [philiēn]) and one in whose position in the poem it stands (λειπομένη [leipomenē] – Homonoea is said to leave tears to Atimetus); the l is shared by all three words, while the v and b are in place of φ and π (the voiced in place of the voiceless fricative and plosive consonants respectively). “Succeeds,” absent semantically from the Greek original, is clearly intended as a sound repetition of the equally central verb in the epitaph’s last line, eskedasen ‘scatter, disperse.’ H.D.’s poem, moreover, maintains the dyadic structure of the Greek epigram in the sense that it alternates – instead of a hexameter line with a pentameter – iambic with trochaic openings if not lines (1 and 3 are iambic almost fully, while 2, 4, and 5 are trochaic). H.D., then, seems to be placing the Greek language itself in Homonoea’s place: echoing, but no longer chattering.

When H.D. republished this poem in the anthology Des Imagistes in 1914, she cut the last line, perhaps for the sake of concision. In so doing, she eliminated the word-rhyme and, more crucially, she released Homonoea, who no longer appears circumscribed by death and Atimetus. The girl is still gone, only echoing; but that echoing, absent the statement of her death, does not make her departure seem irrevocable. It is such an echoing of Greek and Greece that H.D. will explore in almost all of her texts, an echoing of the loss of homonoea or loveliness – a loss of order, a loss of cohesion, a loss of uniformity, of common mind or culture, that may not be as grave or as lamentable as Aldington, Eliot, and sometimes Pound would seem to believe. And she does so by identifying, like Pound and Aldington, this homonoea with the Winckelmannian understanding of the classical period, and exploring its breakdown already in Euripides, as well as its immediate and distant afterlives in the Alexandrian world and in her own time. Rather than reject or idealize a version of Greek homonoea, either in the form of Western rationalism or of Pound’s calm, ordered, and unified relationship of man to nature discovered in the poetry of Tagore at about the same time, she traces in very nuanced ways that complicated relationship between homonoea and the various, more or less, atimetoi who remember it.

From Wind to Wine: H.D.’s Evolving View of the Greek Tradition

Though we cannot be sure exactly when H.D. wrote many of the poems in her first collection Sea Garden, their mostly shared landscape (physical and tropological) is heavily indebted to these inaugural Greek Anthology poems. In some ways, the Anthology poems “explain” the rest, and perhaps for that reason are placed late in the volume.Footnote ⁸⁴ For example, H.D.’s greater programmatic campaign against “loveliness” in Sea Garden may well have begun with the transfiguration of “Priapus.” We have the imagery of overripe fruit in “The Gift,” “Sheltered Garden,” and “Mid-day,” while the tension between loveliness (“scented pinks,” “beauty without strength”) and the “new beauty” of a “sharp swish of a branch” dominates the volume’s sea-flower and garden poems (CP 19–20). The lost lover/companion poems, such as “Acon” or “Loss,” could well be seen as emerging from “Epigram.”

But it is “Hermes of the Ways,” the poem in which the speaker is whipped to speech by Greek wind and by the landscape, that is most productively echoed and developed in the many wind poems in the volume; “Pursuit” also shares its specific landscape. In “The Helmsman” the speaker ambivalently regrets the choice to go “inland” and be “cut off from the wind / and the salt track of the marsh” after having temporarily forgotten the appeal of the latter because “tree-resin, tree-bark, / sweat of a torn branch / were sweet to the taste,” just like the “sweet” water below the ground in the second section of “Hermes” (CP 5, 6, 38). In “The Shrine,” “honey is not more sweet / than the salt stretch of your [= the shrine’s] beach” (8). The sea-shore is now “not forgot,” and as the shrine is “cut with the weight of wind” and responds to it, it comes alive, urged by the wind to participate in nature: “you shudder when it strikes, / then lift, swelled with the blast” (8). By the end, the shrine becomes fully divine: “your eyes have pardoned our faults, / your hands have touched us,” as if Hermes has materialized at last (10). Similarly, in the “Wind Sleepers,” the speakers “no longer sleep / in the wind”; they awake to become not just speaking subjects, but gods instructing their addressees to “Tear – / tear us an altar / … / propitiate us” through song and dance (15). They are stirred to speech, and further transmit that impulse. In “Sea Gods,” the heralded gods return as the sea itself, which suggests that finding the gods is only a matter of looking. This prepares the ground for “Hermes of the Ways,” where Hermes, to the extent that he materializes and “shelter[s] us,” does so as the sea whipping around the ankles. And, as “Sea Gods” insists, the gods are not “cut, torn, mangled, / torn by the stress and beat” – that is, they still return, pace Pound’s own efforts in Ripostes, even in this stress/beat-based prosody (30).

H.D. thus succeeds in writing a set of modern poems that both transcribe or translate Greek (some more than others) and meditate performatively on the process of translation and on the poet’s own temporal position vis-à-vis her originals, and in meaningfully using them for her “original” compositions. As we have seen, Pound similarly seeks a mediated or contextualized way through which to approach Greek lyric but can only produce satisfactory poems when Greek is an idea rather than a text, as in the case of “The Return” or “Δώρια” or of the poems in Lustra. It would seem, then, that with Pound’s Lustra poems and H.D.’s successful transposition of her Anthology translations into Sea Garden, the two poets are set on different Greek trajectories in 1916. Yet despite the disagreements over imagism and the presumed cooling of personal relations between Pound and H.D., their work is still literally on the same page of the Egoist. Unlike the personal invective in the somewhat facetious hellenism debate between Pound and Aldington in 1914, this juxtaposition between Pound and H.D.’s work shows them attacking the same questions in ultimately complementary ways, even if they are sometimes pulling on different threads. Moreover, in her slightly later work with Greek lyric – her versions of Sappho and her oblique self-presentation as translator in the novella “Hipparchia” – H.D. responds to Pound’s turn in Lustra, as well as to his eventual criticism of her work. H.D. shows Pound that ironic distance or reduction isn’t the only way to approach Greek; rather, a complex and historically contextualized relation is possible at the same time as close textual engagement.

Much like the “Homage” to Chrétien in Lustra, Pound’s prose work in 1916 also revisits earlier appropriations of antiquity, focusing on the eighteenth-century version of the quarrel between ancients and moderns: His translation of Fontenelle’s “Dialogues des morts” started serial publication in the Egoist in May 1916. So, for example, in June 1916, H.D.’s Odyssean “Sea Gods” who “haunt men in ships” (CP 29) is followed by Pound’s version of the dialogue between Dido and Stratonice, which offers a pragmatic, skeptical take on the truth and use value of epic. Though the mood of the two texts could not be more distinct, Fontenelle’s/Pound’s perspective is nonetheless consonant with H.D.’s own skepticism regarding the work the poets do and the truth (or falsity) of poetry in, for instance, the Iphigeneia Choruses published in late 1915 (see Chapter 3 below) or on the value of Greek “loveliness.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In September 1916, Pound’s Fontenelle dialogue between Socrates and Montaigne and H.D.’s review of poems by Charlotte Mew similarly seem to be cut from the same cloth.Footnote ⁸⁶ Montaigne’s damning statement about human progress – that “There is no one who does not enter life wholly new, the stupidities of the fathers are not the least use to their children” – is superseded by Socrates’ leveling of the playing field:

Before discussing Mew’s work, H.D. seems to offer a development of the Fontenellian ideas translated by Pound:

Obviously H.D. is using this and subsequent reviews to develop her own poetics. But at the same time, it is as if she is updating Socrates’ argument in Fontenelle: After all, he too begins in apparent eagerness to hear of progress – that is, a kind of originality – before conceding (as H.D. does here through her tone) that there may not be such a thing but that there may nonetheless be value in the right, or rightly viewed, use of one’s literary ancestors. (We have in H.D.’s statement a version – down to the emphasis on “personality” – of the later and much more famous Eliotic argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”) There is also a confluence in the two writers’ imagery. Pound’s/Fontenelle’s Socrates claims that the changes adduced by Montaigne to show him the difference between ancients and moderns are superficial: “Clothes change, but that does not mean a change in the shape of the body” (133). So, H.D. claims,

Perhaps tellingly, the details and chronology in H.D.’s examples are incorrect: It is Masaccio who follows Giotto, while Scopas follows not Polycritus but Polykleitus. Still, the gist of her argument is that going “back” to “tradition” is no different than going “forward” to vorticist “superimposed triangles,” which, she suggests, though seeming new are already a way of going back (“into its original elements”). This is, essentially, the conclusion of Pound’s dialogue: “The general order of nature would seem to be rather constant,” there being “at most an imperceptible inequality” in the distribution of virtues and vices in each age (134). Moreover, as Eliot would later suggest, the extinction of one’s personality when submitting to tradition isn’t complete: You must have one first (and therefore remain Giotto [Masaccio], Scopas, etc.) before you try to escape from it.

Yet while Pound is content with tracing the history of classical reception, having to some extent taken himself out of it at least as far as lyric is concerned, H.D. remains fiercely personally engaged. She uses another 1916 review – this one of fellow imagist John Gould Fletcher’s Goblins and Pagodas – in order to make the case for why this must be so, and it is in this light that we should see her own engagement with Sappho in the following years. Defending his poetry against vorticism perhaps, Fletcher had argued for the superiority of figurative over abstract art through the metaphor of a Greek vase: “‘the key-pattern on a Greek vase may be beautiful, but it is less beautiful … than the composition of satyrs and maenads struggling about the center.’”Footnote ⁸⁷ H.D. pretends to “continue his apt metaphor” but in fact refutes it:

H.D. rejects Fletcher’s distinction between human and abstract altogether, substituting for it one between surface and content/essence, raiment and body, we might say. What interests H.D., though, is not the latter over the former, but the interplay between the two: “the images suggested by shadow and light, the flicker of the purple wine” as reflected within the walls of the jar, and as the jar is moved, taken to a different place or to a different time. Critical of the static image, even if it is an image of motion – much as Pound might be – H.D. uses “perfection” literally: The images of the maenad and satyr are done, finished, caught still in that pose “for ever,” and so eminently readable, obvious. She suggests that human figures and geometric patterns are equally decorative and beside the point, only an add-on to the vase’s real function and use (here echoing Marsden’s emphasis on beauty as dependent on use): to hold or frame a variable and always different-looking liquid that is meant to be consumed rather than looked at, and to intoxicate rather than be solely admired.Footnote ⁸⁸ If the jar is a Keatsian urn, intended as a representation of antiquity tout court, H.D. is making here an early version of her argument about Euripidean tragedy and its words as portals – that is, antiquity is not to be gazed at and studied, but used, experienced (like the wind of “Hermes”), entered into.

It is in this way that H.D.’s speakers and protagonists enter Sappho’s textual frames in the series of poems titled “Fragment [no.]” included in her poetry collections of the 1920s. H.D.’s Sapphic ur-texts are not avant-garde; unlike Pound, who, four years after Aldington first got to them, discovers for himself the aesthetic appeal of newly uncovered Sappho fragments, H.D. gravitates towards the single lines cited by other ancient authors. Extending them into hypnotic narratives spanning multiple pages isn’t just what they allow, given their bareness, but what they demand. The form in which they have been handed down is not due to the accidental ravages of time and climate, but to a personal choice once made by another writer to both preserve, use, and build on (this line as an example of word usage or melodiousness, that one as support for an argument, etc.), and to discard. H.D. plucks her Sappho from a context of use and intentional, personal memorialization, where Sappho was more, or less, than “lyric poet,” “lesbian,” “woman,” “lover,” and where not she as an imagined person, but her words were an exemplum for something else – thus now they can become a new exemplum for H.D.Footnote ⁸⁹ Choosing these fragments is part of H.D.’s constructed garland, in which she self-consciously places herself (much as Pound does in his “Homage”) in the line of Sappho’s “receivers.” But unlike Pound, who, by 1916, performs a distant Greek reading, H.D. fully inhabits the textual, formal body of Sappho’s poems even as she seems to depart from them.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is “Hipparchia” that reveals most clearly the nuanced complexity of H.D.’s self-perception as a translator of Greek lyric, and specifically of Sappho, by dramatizing her practice.

Of Grapes and Hyacinths: Embodying Translation

In the 1920s critics and many of her contemporaries, including Pound, dismissed H.D. as a “hellenist” in both of the word’s derogatory senses: a poet who, on the one hand, always strove for an unattainable and idealized Greece, choosing to populate her landscapes with its mythical characters rather than live in her own time (and thus an “escapist”) and, on the other hand, a poet who turned to the wrong Greece, to Euripides, rather than to Aeschylus, to the small poems of the Hellenistic Greek Anthology rather than to any of the earlier stages. “Hipparchia” is H.D.’s response to these stereotypes. Set in 75 bce Rome, the novella centers on a displaced Greek, ostensibly the daughter of the historical Hipparchia and her husband Crates, a pair of Cynic philosophers who actually lived several centuries before. The younger Hipparchia’s ambivalent relationship to “Greece” is summed up in the two epigrams by Antipater of Sidon – who would have flourished only about fifty years before this fictional character – that form the novella’s two refrains. The first is about the real Hipparchia, whose life of renunciation her “daughter” cannot follow, and the second laments the destruction and looting of Corinth in 146 bce.Footnote ⁹¹ While Hipparchia is stifled by her Athenian mother’s example – an example that only exists in and through Antipater’s poem and so is literally a poetic modelFootnote ⁹² – she also constantly laments the Romanization of the Greek world and sees her own work, as poet and anthologist-scholar, as aimed squarely at recovery and reconstruction, at undoing Roman conquest. What Hipparchia is searching for – a productive, non-idealizing relationship to things Greek – aligns with H.D.’s own (already realized) ambitions that had remained nonetheless invisible to both her friends and critics and that she thus dramatizes here through Hipparchia’s acts of translation, in which the story culminates.

The two poems by Antipater are woven deeply into the texture of the story though their translation is not thematized. They do, moreover, respond well to those selected by Pound in his “Homage.” To the Palladas epigram, H.D. adds another “season” for acceptable femininity in the Anthology: namely, the woman, neither dead nor asleep, who rejects all feminine trappings in order to join a male tradition (“I cast my lot with cynics,” “I kept no tunic with bright gem”), a version of the “H.D.” who could be part of Pound’s group of imagist men in, for example, his account of the poetic “Status Rerum” published in the same issue of Poetry as H.D.’s first imagist poems but making no mention of her. (The rest of the story will deconstruct this binary choice between the “hard,” ascetic life of the philosopher and the luxurious, pampered life of the woman.) Antipater’s Corinth epigram is actually located immediately before Pound’s Agathias poem on Troy in the Anthology; given that Pound was thinking about Antipater in late 1915,Footnote ⁹³ it is possible they had discussed them. In any case, where Pound hits a somewhat mocking tone, H.D.’s version, more pared-down even compared to Antipater (nothing is “gilded”), offers a real lament, and one that is sung by a chorus of Nereids and gulls rather than surviving as an impersonally recorded “douth and story.” Instead of surveying from a distance as Pound does through Chrétien, H.D. places herself and her character in that exact moment of epochal change, of potential textual transmission and its failings, mapping it out from the inside.

When Hipparchia’s lover, the Roman soldier Marius, argues in response to her recitation of Antipater on Corinth that Rome “builds rock upon the ruins of a decadent civilization,” she refutes his emphasis on decay and offers one of the story’s predominant metaphors for their personal relationship, and for that between Greece and Rome, by comparing Rome’s conquests to grapes that are

Hipparchia insists on the violence of Rome’s appropriation of Greece, but her final question is about survival and metamorphosis – translation in a sense: Is wine, a product wrought by violence, an appropriate metaphor for the remains of the kind of destruction she is describing? That is, can these remains too survive, as we might say grapes do in wine, and even be more potent, have a different kind of effect, now that they have been ruined, scattered, or blended? Can destruction in the end be a positive transformation, producing something that might be more intoxicating than what it destroyed? Is the distilled idea, culture, or (literally) spirit of Greece more potent than whatever Greece itself was? Perhaps, but, unlike H.D. in her 1916 review of Fletcher, Hipparchia herself isn’t quite ready to admit this, because of her investment in her Greek identity. The grape becomes the novella’s central image, “a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (to quote Pound’s definition); it weaves together concrete image motifs of “Hipparchia” itself, ensuring the coherence of this story, H.D.’s own prior work in prose (Fletcher review) and poetry (“Priapus,” “Fragment 113”), theoretical questions surrounding translation and the relation between antiquity and modernity, and, as we will see, Greek lyric early and late.

Near the end of the novella we realize that the story’s grape imagery comes from yet another epigram, this one by Moero of Byzantium, who flourished in the late fourth/early third centuries bce. That H.D. has “Hipparchia” appropriate this particular poet’s voice does not seem accidental. Moero is remembered second in Meleager’s proem to the Garland, right between Anyte and Sappho.Footnote ⁹⁴ She is associated with additional evocative names: Moero was the wife of Andromachus Philologus and the mother of Homerus of Byzantium.Footnote ⁹⁵ Of her poetry very little survives: a passage from her epic poem Mnēmosynē and two epigrams in the Anthology. So, the female poet who wrote of memory is also the one who gave birth to a son whose name is synonymous with the birth of poetry, and who came out of a marriage with “philology.” Here is what H.D. often calls a “formula” – in this case, moreover, H.D.’s own formula: Memory plus meticulous love of words equals poetry. That Moero was born in Byzantium, a city unimportant in her own time and in Hipparchia’s, but one in which the Roman Empire would become Greek again, is of course also very telling in the context of this particular story.Footnote ⁹⁶

Moero’s poem, as seen by H.D./Hipparchia, recapitulates many of the novella’s color and nature motifs and in Hipparchia’s initial version emphasizes the desolation of the grape unprotected by its “mother-stalk.”

In the context of the novella’s repeated wine-presser analogy, this short grape poem becomes a synecdoche for Greece, and it is thus Hipparchia herself translating it “into the heavier language” (Latin, but in fact English) that becomes the wine presser. Hipparchia may seem to be decrying destruction and deracination but is already, at the very moment of her confrontation with Marius early in the story, performing it insofar as she is, without acknowledgment, putting Moero’s poem to work, transforming its terms and images into her own (“shaken from the parent … from the firm vine,” “leaves foot mark of red, stain,” etc.), and using it to articulate her present state to Marius.

This suspicion is confirmed when Hipparchia refers to her final version of the translation as her “triumph”: “Hipparchia I have triumphed. I found it on the way home. It was written in authentic metre in the air above me” (78–79). She figures herself as a victorious Roman general getting his triumph upon his return, on the way home, to Rome; hence perhaps the superfluous use of her name here: hipp-archia, ruler of horses. Moreover, etymologically triumph is connected to the Greek thriambos, a hymn to Dionysus, god of wine. That is, a triumph is literally Greek wine-poetry in military repackaging – precisely the things that Hipparchia has been ambivalent about but now conveys no hesitation over. The meter she finds is indeed the meter in H.D.’s air, an English meter. From the first to the second version, she radically condenses the description of the grape, which produces four tight lines of perfect stress-based iambic tetrameter:

It’s as if she’s performed the Poundian slashing on her own poem.

When, then, Hipparchia nonetheless demurs from translating Sappho, we may treat that with some circumspection:

Hipparchia thus presumably preserves that soul by “preserving” Sappho in Greek, resisting the metamorphosis of grape to wine. Or does she? The Sappho poem in question, “the hyacinth and the shepherd which had so long escaped her” (72), is Fragment 105C: “like the hyacinth in the mountains that shepherd men / with their feet trample down and on the ground the purple flower.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The poem had not escaped H.D.: She had already used it, without acknowledgment, in 1916’s “Pursuit,” writing, “What do I care / that the stream is trampled, / … / But here / a wild-hyacinth stalk is snapped: / the purple buds – half ripe – / show deep purple / where your heel pressed” (CP 11).Footnote ⁹⁹ Looking at 105C and Moero’s poem side by side, together with H.D.’s versions of both, we may well surmise that H.D. wants to draw a connection between them, that she is suggesting perhaps the indebtedness of Moero’s conceit to Sappho’s: The purple grape, like the purple hyacinth, is torn from its natural context, the former for religious reasons which may excuse the (implicit) violence, the latter possibly for marriage (Sappho’s poem has been considered a marriage poem). The fetishization of Sappho exposes Hipparchia’s own incomplete reading; she is enraged at the Roman abuse of Greek culture when she is silently doing “the same” (and indeed using the sacred Sappho for her first version of Moero), and when the poem she is translating may itself be doing it.

And yet at this moment when Hipparchia is deciding to look away from Sappho in order to preserve Sappho’s integrity, H.D. has her perform, re-enact Sappho’s whole poem (or at least our scholarly reconstruction of it). For 105C is paired with 105A: “as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch / high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot – / no, not forgot: were unable to reach.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Fragment 105A is about the apple being unreachable, too good, and so not to be desecrated, just as Hipparchia says about Sappho; 105C is about the purple hyacinth’s careless desecration, just as Moero may have done with Sappho and Hipparchia with Moero.Footnote ¹⁰¹ That is, in this case of Hipparchia’s failed or forestalled translation in favor of letting “Greek” be, there is actually translation taking place that doesn’t neatly fit into any received category. H.D. is embedding the translation alternatives laid out for her by her community of fellow poets and scholars – an appropriation of Moero into the “meter in the air” (whether the vers libre of the first version or the tight quatrain of the second) or an idealization leading to non-translation of Sappho – into a story that debates them, and in so doing also repeats Sappho’s own ancient gesture. As in “Priapus,” but even more so here, H.D. acknowledges, if not foregrounds, the present moment and the writer’s own actions in shaping the past – a “present moment” that, as she had suggested in her review of Mew, is both old (insofar as the story takes place in 75 bce) and contemporary, both hellenist and modern(ist). Hipparchia can follow Moero, Moero Sappho, and yet all three remain H.D.

The Currency of Drama in the 1910s

“The dramatists are dead: the poets have gone to the funeral”: So journalist and novelist Storm Jameson, The Egoist’s regular columnist on modern drama, begins her assessment of the arts in England in November 1915.Footnote ¹⁵ Maintaining that “Hamlet is as classic as the Iliad or the Agamemnon,” she argues that all arts, but especially drama, have gone downhill, though she singles out for slight praise the “Imagists” and in particular Pound and Aldington.Footnote ¹⁶ It was H.D.’s translation of “Choruses from Iphigeneia in Aulis” that had nonetheless appeared in the very same issue of the magazine, apparently already deemed unworthy of even attending the funeral of drama as the wartime canon is set: Hamlet, Iliad, Agamemnon. Two years later, Edward Storer attributes the death of tragic drama to the loss of “belief,” and praises Greek tragedy – its possibility now lost – for its formalism, for presenting “symbolical and characterless” man.Footnote ¹⁷ Lamenting the decline of verse drama and advocating for “blank acting,” Storer fits right in with the new spirit of the Egoist, as Eliot takes over from H.D. as assistant editor, and he and Pound begin the formalist revolution referred to in “Visiting Card”; Storer’s connection between social conditions and metrics was echoed by both Pound and Eliot.

Despite Jameson’s dismissal, the currency of drama at the time is strongly conveyed in H.D.’s semi-fictionalized account of First World War–era London Bid Me to Live. The novel’s first two pages offer a critique of her generation’s modes of relating art to the world and to the past that explicitly flows through Greek tragedy.

H.D. evokes the spirit of the age as one that mixed high and low, that disrespected the “venerable” past, the Uffizi and the Pitti museums in Florence, and playfully equated Punch and Judy with Philoctetes and Jocasta. Her ironic tone, however, betrays the same suspicion that Pound would express about Greek plays and their value, but also about the very -ism that brought her, as a poet, to the forefront of London literary life.Footnote ¹⁸ Though ostensibly concerned with the artistic revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century, H.D. intertwines art and war, mapping the time of the former onto that of the latter. War may be referred to only obliquely in the “crucifying times of history,” but the “liberation” of the arts is itself a revolution, their own and of their own times, and therefore, to some extent violent; thus H.D. introduces the word “march” in the next paragraph to describe not military but artistic activity.

H.D. mocks the artistic pretension of destruction and overcoming – the Futurist, and eventually Hulmean, call to destroy museums – precisely on the basis of what is implied in her first few sentences: The “customs” of the times that seemed particular or unique, “their own,” were in fact implicated in and complicit with history’s but not in the way that these artists had envisioned.Footnote ¹⁹ That is, Pound’s sudden modernization, his launching of a movement and discovery of a publishing outlet may have helped him finally be part of “the times,” but “the times” too were slowly imposing their own “customs” of war and obliteration. The critique, moreover, is twofold. On the one hand, there was an unconscious, at least rhetorical, alignment between artistic revolution and the looming world war, and on the other, a complete separation between the two, the real or feigned indifference of the “intellectuals” towards the specific reality of the war: “the late war-intellectuals gabbed of Oedipus across tea-cups or Soho café tables; it was not Vimy or Loos they talked of” (Bid 8). Given, then, that in this context it is Greek tragedy that is first invoked as a new plaything, even before the -isms, and that the plays H.D. names are Philoctetes, the play of prolonged war and betrayal, and Oedipus Rex, the play of the excess of reason, might H.D. be implying that if the lessons of these plays had been heeded, rather than just touted, one might have foreseen the destruction that ensued?

H.D. seems at first to use Greek tragedy incidentally in order to address a larger issue, but then shows why Greek tragedy is an exemplary site for such reflections. Bid dramatizes H.D.’s/Julia’s turn away from the spirit of the times and the facetious invocation of Philoctetes and Oedipus either as a matter of fashion or of elitism, to a more serious engagement with tragedy (as the “hatching” passage discussed in the Introduction suggests), which we will explore in Chapter 3. Crucially, the catalyzing experience takes place at a movie theater: “as in the stone-ledged theatre benches of fifth-century Greece; so here, a thousand doomed, the dead were watching destruction, Oedipus or Orestes in a slim car, dashing to destruction” (123). Transposing Greek tragedy onto the movie screen, the communal experience of the Athenian theatergoing public onto that of the wartime London movie-watching public, Julia is finally able to articulate an identification that goes beyond the vapid references to Oedipus and that reveals the plays’ direct bearing on the contemporary situation: Oedipus’s destructive quest for absolute truth, Orestes’ for absolute justice. Not the film itself – or the tragic text itself – but the experience of watching it with others reveals to Julia the fundamentally public and in some sense ritual character of tragedy,Footnote ²⁰ as well as its potential as a medium through and in which to grapple with the questions she has been asking throughout the novel: How does one connect the world of art and poetry to the “actual”? Is beauty or redemption possible in the aftermath of the war? Is the past still available for poetry, or is it immaterial in the midst of destruction?

H.D.’s formulation of the cultural aesthetics of the second half of the 1910s in Bid allows us to detect these threads in the work of her contemporaries, who may seem less interested in these questions than she clearly was. We can thus trace the sometimes muted significance of Greek drama in the development of the main currents of modernist poetics; both Eliot and Pound, for example, assess the possibilities of drama in the 1910s, mostly measuring it against the Noh and Greek tragedy, in ways similar to those H.D. highlights. H.D.’s “Choruses,” questioning not only war but art’s complicity in it, were thus far from an outlier; her translations were forerunners in the attempt to grapple with new customs for the times through drama, and specifically through tragedy.

The Promise of Sarah Bernhardt

In late spring 1914, attempting a move from lyric to drama, Pound asks F. S. Flint – whose article on French -isms had likely inspired Pound to start his own two years earlier – for recommendations on French plays after having spent the winter at Stone Cottage reading “mss. plays for the Abbey” with Yeats (L/P 316). About a year later, in early September 1915, upon receipt of the final installment of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of the play Exiles, Pound writes a long letter to James Joyce, in which he wavers on his opinion on the theater. One senses he doesn’t want to offend Joyce and genuinely likes Exiles, but his elitism prevents him from seeing any future in the endeavor: “My whole habit of thinking of the stage is: that it is a gross, coarse form of art. That a play speaks to a thousand fools huddled together” (L/JJ 46). Even Joyce’s play, though it is better than most, lacks the intensity of Portrait in Pound’s assessment. Concluding that “I hate (oh well, not hate) the theatre,” he nonetheless concedes that “I may be wrong. The thing might carry” (46, 47).

Exiles prompts Pound to write “Mr. James Joyce and the Modern Stage,” an essay published five months later, in February 1916, in The Drama – the journal in which Pound had been publishing excerpts from Fenollosa’s Noh book and where he hoped Exiles itself would appear. The essay contemplates the question of whether drama is a worthwhile medium for authors at that time, the very same question that Eliot would take on with renewed vigor in the 1920s and 30s. Pound is more systematic here than in his letter to Joyce, but equally ambivalent. On the one hand, he makes his case against the audience more starkly. Exiles, he writes, “is a ‘dangerous’ play precisely because the author … is dealing with actual thought, actual questioning, not with clichés of thought and emotion. It is untheatrical … because the closeness and cogency of the process is … too great for an audience to be able to follow … under present conditions” (L/JJ 52). On the other hand, the cautious addition of “under present conditions” may imply that – unlike Eliot, who in his early theater criticism feared the actors’ execution of a play – it is not the form of theater itself that is the problem. Indeed, Pound spends the rest of his essay breaking down the “complex art” of drama into its component parts and considers the “possibilities of greatness” latent in acting, speech, cinema, and so on – a method borrowed perhaps from Fenollosa’s attempt at a systematic treatment of the Noh (52).

What arises from this account is surprising given Pound’s professed disdain for the theater, and suggests most clearly why he would (re)turn to this medium (and to Greek tragedy) after the Second World War and before turning back to the writing of the Cantos. Pound claims he saw “great acting” – that is, “acting itself raised to the dignity of an art” – “once”: in the performance of an aged Sarah Bernhardt in La Sorcière,Footnote ²¹ “not much of a play.” The climax – if not of the play, at least of Pound’s experience of it – comes when

Bernhardt, that is, performs the exact same gesture, and with similar implications of rebirth, that Pound would have his Herakles undertake at the climax of his Women of Trachis. He immediately and tellingly connects this performance to the Noh:

The image, precisely beyond formulated language, and in some ways beyond action. What Pound admires is not the Harrisonian dromenon, nor is there here a strong emphasis on gesture qua ritual (as there would be in Eliot’s own early thoughts on theater), though he does call Bernhardt’s “gestures” “superb” (53). Bernhardt is remarkable because she breaks the boundaries of her limited (to Pound’s eyes) art; against the constant “action” of theatrical plot she becomes “something which can stay still without becoming a bore,” such powerful “stasis” being for Pound the defining feature of art.Footnote ²²

Pound returns to Bernhardt’s clearly haunting performance in his essay’s next section, on “Speech”:

Here Pound articulates the later Eliotic position on the power of verse playsFootnote ²³ in a more precise and visceral way than Eliot would ever describe it. It is also in alignment with his thoughts on meter in relation to Greek tragedy, as they would be articulated in letters and essays of the late 1910s. At the same time, that sense of the audience now receiving messages as it were from the air, just as the poet does in Spirit of Romance, implies the hidden promise of the theater in setting off/up that telegraphic chain of light or sound – sound which again seems to be beyond formulated language, likened to that of a “very small bell.”Footnote ²⁴ Even more crucially though, the conjunction of these two elements on the stage, the sculptural phanopoeia and the hypnotic melopoeia, seems to accord the theater supreme power: to make the utterly evanescent – a performance – permanent for everyone who witnesses it. Without writing, without speech even, the theater can leave a forméd trace in the mind, dove stà memora (to quote Pound’s favorite lines from Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega”). By returning to Bernhardt throughout the essay, Pound is performing that persistence. More than thirty years later, Pound’s manuscript notes for Sophocles’ Elektra would contain an articulation that recalls the Exiles essay:

The stage, Pound suggests, allows for the combination of sound and vision, melopoeia and phanopoeia. It is for this reason as well, and perhaps also prompted by H.D.’s translations of Iphigeneia, that Pound proposes the Noh play, comparable to a Greek tragedy, as a potential model for writing a long (imagist) poem – the triangulation that would come to fruition in Women of Trachis.Footnote ²⁶

Noh, Tragedy, and the Long Poem

As we have seen, one way in which Pound pursues poems of greater length is through lyric sequences, shading into versions of Browning-esque dramatic monologue: from “Ladies” to “Homage to Quintus Septimius Florentis Christianus” to Propertius and Mauberley. Another model is the epic, but that doesn’t fully crystallize in Pound’s mind until 1918, despite the already completed translation of Divus that would become Canto 1. But in the crucial transitional years of 1915–16, Pound also attempts to conceptualize the long poem through drama. In Gaudier-Brzeska, exactly where he theorizes imagism as translation, he suggests that for an imagist poem to “live” longer than a few lines, it must be similar to Japanese Noh plays.Footnote ²⁷ The Noh shares with imagism a hygienic, reductive emphasis, functioning as “a purification of the Japanese soul” (P&T 361). What interests Pound the most is that “[i]n the best “Noh” the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered about one image. Its unity consists in one image,” much like “the Greek plays are built up about a single moral conviction” (GB 94; P&T 368). The latent Noh image may be ready to be discovered, but for Pound it too only appears beyond formulated language:Footnote ²⁸ the words “are themselves but half shadows” and become intelligible if “‘you read them all the time as though you were listening to music’” (P&T 336). The word-musical element of the Noh, restoring the importance of melopoeia, brings it closer first to the troubadour poetry that Pound so admired,Footnote ²⁹ but also back to Greek, and from a different angle: not that of structure or ritualistic function, but of prosody. The poetic model the Noh provides, then, addresses both technical, formal concerns (regarding the relationship, e.g, between vision and sound, speech and music, and the coherence of the whole despite the reliance on multiple poetic resources) and a societal/political function.

Indeed, Eliot offers Pound a framework through which to “legitimize” his interest in Greek sound by connecting it to the larger historical patterns they are both interested in at the time. As Storer would suggest in the Egoist, part of what makes tragedy appealing is the connection it reveals between poetry and culture. Similarly Eliot in 1917’s “Reflections on Vers Libre” insists that “the decay of intricate formal patterns has nothing to do with the advent of vers libre” (CP 1, 516). Their flourishing, he asserts, does not depend on poetry but on the polity:

He thus ties metrics to society, giving poetic form a political, or at least social, extension, much as Pound had done with Tagore in 1913 and again with the Noh in 1916–17.Footnote ³⁰

For Eliot too the Noh functions as a paradigm for what is desirable in modern theater, and perhaps poetry too, but in contradistinction to tragedy. His early writing on drama hits some of the same notes as Pound’s – anti-realism, preference for form over plot and suggestiveness over statement, elitist disdain of audiences – though he is already more invested in its possible success.Footnote ³¹ In “The Noh and the Image,” his 1917 review of Pound’s Noh translations, Eliot presents Noh as an imagist corrective to Greek tragedy. The Noh chorus may speak “in a lament almost Greek,” but “the ‘image’ character of Noh makes the play brief,” thereby “prevent[ing] rhetoric,” that perennial imagist enemy and precisely what Pound and Eliot both disliked in Greek choral songs (CP 1, 567). The only Greek play comparable to the Noh in terms of “the unity of the image” is Prometheus, singled out as the least realistic of the extant Greek plays since, like the Noh, it presents “that impersonal, and … inhuman force” (566).

Eliot also tests out in this Noh review the soon-to-be-formulated idea of the “objective correlative,” which he would define in 1919 as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion” that a work of art seeks to convey (CP 2, 125). Eliot uses it to draw a distinction between Greek drama (still exclusively represented by Aeschylus) and Shakespeare on the one hand, and the Noh on the other:

While the Noh stage is sparse, what is present collects the energies of all that is left unsaid or unseen. Unlike in Hamlet, whose problem, per the 1919 essay, is the inadequacy of “the external to the emotion,” in the Noh the emotion is suggestively yet always concretely on display (CP 2, 125). It is precisely this desire to “enact” the ghost that leads Eliot to use the silent figures of the Eumenides in The Family Reunion: as a kind of objective correlative that may illuminate the mind of Harry or complement his own semi-articulate explanations. The theater, again, seems the pathway to the timeless-in-time for art, a way to show, as Pound would later put it in his Elektra, that the “DEAD / don’t / DIE” (lines 1754–56).

Eliot finally measures the degree of Pound’s own (Japanese-filtered) poetic innovations; his assessment hinges on the determination of what is an appropriate dramatic voice. He principally objects to what seems to him to be Yeats’s influence in the dialogueFootnote ³² – an early attempt on Pound’s part to “get a ‘language’” perhaps – while he singles out for praise, and ends his review on, the mostly (bilingually) onomatopoetic ghost lovers’ cricket song in Nishikigi. (Such a split assessment will haunt all of Pound’s translations of Greek tragedy.) The song is, claims Eliot, “a remarkable triumph of translator’s skill: it is certainly English, and it is certainly new in English” (567):

“English” is thus being redefined here as the kind of verse that readily incorporates these other sounds or languages: the kind of English we find in Eliot’s The Waste Land, sometimes in the Cantos, and definitely in Pound’s translations from Greek. The triumph of the translator’s skill lies in the knowing deployment of non-translation, and in using the other language to create an interlinguistic whole, much as Pound would try to do years later in his Elektra. Sound is encoded with meaning here: “kiri” and “hatari” combine to give “cricket,” which morphs into “rags” and “grass”; “grass” is then transformed into “churr” and “whirr.” “Churr” is itself onomatopoetic, and echoes back to “cho,” a word that has also started a separate sonic chain: from the English “sews” to the Japanese “sho” and “isho.” What the cricket is celebrated as doing is precisely what the poet is doing: sewing the old rags (of English) with the new (Japanese) grass in the field. The next play in the sequence, “Kinuta,” also ends with a cricket song – a “sad sound” this time, still incorporated into Pound’s English – that resolves into “a whispering lamentation, hera, hera, a sound in the cloth of beauty” (P&T 423). We will hear this cry again in Women of Trachis.

Such an onomatopoetic cry lies at the heart of the shared Eliot–Pound mythology of the Agamemnon.Footnote ³³ There the chorus compares Kassandra’s incomprehensible and inharmonious/tuneless (ἄνομον) cries to the song of the nightingale, groaning for Itys: ᾿Ίτυν ᾿Ίτυν στένουσ ̓ (lines 1142, 1144). “Itys” is both a name and a sound, and we hear it echoing in The Waste Land’s “twit, twit, twit” (P 63), praised in Pound’s essay on Aeschylus, and lamented in the Pisan Cantos. Similarly, the choral song earlier in the play that famously puns on Helen’s name is, first, another instance of sound encoding meaning and second, also about that very process, since the chorus is commenting on the appropriateness of Helen’s name (which is of course itself a lifelong Poundian preoccupation). The punning words ἑλέναυς, ἕλανδρος, ἑλέπτολις (helenaus, helandros, heleptolis, “hell to ships, to men, to cities”) will also echo throughout the CantosFootnote ³⁴ and, as we have seen, serve as shorthand for Eliot’s response to the draft of Canto 2. Pound and Eliot seem to be aligned on what makes a voice appropriately dramatic: It hovers on the border of intelligibility, and points at something beyond itself, not exhausting itself in the performance. However, even though both poets would use Greek tragedy especially to think about history or, more broadly, about the relation of the present to the past, and both are drawn to its promise of communal – whether religious or political – power, Pound would hold on to the importance of linguistic formalism and formalization (paradigmatically expressed through metrical experimentation or foreign languages) more than Eliot, whose approach in his tragedy adaptations would be primarily structural.

Contracting Greek Tragedy

Despite the promising connection between Greco-Japanese drama and English poetics in GB, Pound’s later critical writings on the theater hit the skeptical note more often than not. Its promise of being a total work of art is seen from the opposite side, and theater is dismissed as a “mixed art” that is faulty because it doesn’t rely solely on writing. For example, in a typescript draft of “How to Read,” we are told that “The literary element need not be very good, in a play … bad writing can be very useful for theatrical purposes.”Footnote ³⁵ Tragedy doesn’t fare better, it too apparently marred by “bad writing.” At almost the same time as he’s thinking about it in conjunction with Noh, he confesses to Iris Barry that he is “suspicious of Greek drama”:

Pound’s critique here is similar to Eliot’s in his unpublished French review of translations from Greek (discussed in the Introduction), which also focused on clichés and verboseness. Pound’s own conclusion on the Virgilian clichéFootnote ³⁷ – transposed here from the “Greeks” in general to drama specifically – suggests, however, that Pound is merely going through the motions of opining on this “important literature,” and thus himself using some of the rhetoric associated with it. The play whose name Pound has forgotten is, of course, Persians – not a very difficult name to remember if one has read the play at all.

Pound’s choice of plays also reflects prevailing intellectual currents – both poetic and academic. For one, Pound like Eliot falls prey to the nineteenth-century prejudice in favor of Aeschylus.Footnote ³⁸ Prometheus and Persians are part of the so-called “Byzantine triad” for Aeschylus,Footnote ³⁹ and so the ones with most accrued scholarly or pedagogical prestige or, for Pound, philological detritus. That Pound does not seem embarrassed by his acutely Shelleyan selections also suggests that that is precisely the nature of his attack. Shelley’s counter-Aeschylean, tradition-flouting sequel to Prometheus Bound in Prometheus Unbound (1819) and his revolutionary modernization of Persians in Hellas (1822) act as a negative filter that prevents Pound from actually engaging with the plays.Footnote ⁴⁰ He may also be hiding a more personal embarrassment over his own “stale creampuffs”: 1908’s A Lume Spento contains a poem titled “Prometheus,” which betrays Pound’s earlier attraction to Prometheus as a quintessentially Romantic figure.Footnote ⁴¹ The Titan may have been newly present in Pound’s mind because his hellenist rival Richard Aldington had translated the very end of the play in the early 1910sFootnote ⁴² and had written a “Prometheus” poem too. Finally, it is Prometheus that Nietzsche singles out in The Birth of Tragedy, turning him into an “ideal” Dionysian figure,Footnote ⁴³ and there is no doubt that this Dionysianism, filtered down through Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray’s work, lies behind Aldington’s engagement and thus also Pound’s, again prejudicing his (and Eliot’s) response.

Yet Pound’s attitude is more subtle; what is being rejected is less the plays themselves than the various prevailing approaches to them (even as those color Pound’s rhetoric). This explains his eventual shift to the Oresteia, and the Agamemnon in particular, whose only prominent expounder is Browning; though Pound rips his translation to shreds, he does so as Browning’s avowed admirer. Pound may here facetiously dismiss the sense of duty – one must read Greek plays because they are excellent – that Eliot expresses more earnestly, but he does express some admiration for the ones he singles out. These two plays contemplate questions of Greek identity (Persians) and religious belief (Prometheus), in Pound’s favorite triangulated, comparative way. In the former, Aeschylus surveys his own culture through the (imagined) eyes of the Persians; in the latter, the drama is fully displaced onto the divine realm. These are Greek mythical figures, of course, but they are also allegorized forces of nature (as Shelley suggests), of the kind that would come to populate the Cantos; after all, Prometheus comes onstage calling to natural powers against Zeus, to the plenitude of nature against hierarchy.

Though conceptually tragedy is aligned with the Noh as offering a way into a long poem, unsurprisingly what draws Pound back down to tragedy’s specifics is the melopoeia he had abandoned in Lustra. Pound ends his next letter to Barry with the following postscriptum:

Once again expressing his suspicion of a much-discussed play, Pound responds to Oedipus through a familial lineage of his own – one which is not tragically doomed but according to which each generation is better than the preceding one. The familial relation between French and Latin is of course different from that between Latin and Greek, making evolution or improvement in the former case easier to conceptualize. English, pointedly absent here, would thus stand on the other side of Romance languages in the way that Greek does. Moreover, as soon as he proposes this genealogical hierarchy of languages, in which Greek would rank last, Pound himself points out its less than steady ground: Greek is the worst, “save certain melodic effects,” which, presumably, remain to be improved upon, perhaps in a not so bad “trans. of Sophocles.” Is that the challenge he sets for English, his own tongue that is left unmentioned and unranked? By 1918 Pound would attribute “the desire for vers libre” in English poetry to “the sense of quantity reasserting itself after years of starvation” (LE 12).

While Pound remains skeptical of Greek tragedy yet intrigued by the possibilities of its translation, Eliot is more committed to its value without translation. The difference in the two poets’ priorities with respect to Greek is nowhere clearer than in their reviews of H.D.’s Iphigeneia choruses. Both praise her work against existing translations of tragedy – especially Gilbert Murray’s – while Eliot specifically excludes her from his panning of the rest of the PTS. But the goal of their reviews is different. Pound is trying to figure out how best to translate tragedy – and so, for instance, begins his essay by ironizing critics of such a project – while Eliot is hinting at an argument for not doing so at all. For Pound, regardless of the merits of H.D.’s English text, which he does not discuss in detail, H.D. is in the wrong from the outset because of her choice of materials; she has picked the wrong tragedian and given up on the sense of the whole by translating only choruses (P&P 3, 224). Pound himself would soon attempt to rectify these faults through his work on the Agamemnon. Eliot makes similar points in his own review, written two years before. He sees a disjunction between H.D.’s modern English poetic commitments and Greek poetics; for instance, by focusing on Euripides’ images – which, according to Eliot, “were made up of stock phrases rearranged” – she “lose[s] contact with the original in avoiding clichés” (CP 1, 493). This in turn reinforces his argument that there is “no adequate translation” of Greek (italics in original, 493). For Eliot’s primary charge against Murray isn’t the staleness of his poetic style but the implicit ideology of his approach: He has transformed Euripides into “an ideal of socialism and popular education,” presenting the possibility of “Greek without tears” (493). This has thematic and linguistic implications; “Greek without tears” means viewing tragedy as fundamentally optimistic and making it easier to approach and study through translation, which in turn disincentivizes the learning of Greek (493).

The two poets’ broader attitudes towards Greek also come through in the details of their rhetoric and intimate how each is about to make his opening bid for tragedy. For Pound Greek is, if not a threat, a challenge; for Eliot it is an exploitable resource. H.D., Eliot writes, does often succeed in bringing Greek and English into contact, which “gives life to both … makes it possible for the modern language perpetually to draw sustenance from the dead” (494). English and Greek may be figured as dead if this translation is what gives them life, but then Eliot explicitly identifies only Greek as the dead language, presaging his 1925 appeal for the learning of Greek because it is dead (CP 2, 576). Pound instead identifies H.D.’s major contribution as follows: “If,” he writes, “via Homer and Aeschylus one have contracted an interest in the Atreidae, H.D.’s choruses should be a great relief from other windy and verbose translators” (P&P 3, 224). In contrast to Eliot’s wholesome reference to “sustenance,” Pound’s use of “contract” to specify the mode of transmission of such interest is more ominous. Throughout his essays Pound resorts to terminology of infection and inoculation when issuing his prescriptions for how to write or “how to read”;Footnote ⁴⁴ he is in the business of offering cures. Pound may be receptive to H.D.’s translation project so that this turn to the Atreidae is not an altogether unwelcome contraction, but a contraction it remains nonetheless, as though once you begin to approach Agamemnon, you catch a disease that you cannot shake off. At the same time, such a contraction is also a contract – the verb contract is shared by both nouns. The Atreidae impose, as it were, a formal obligation; once you begin with them, you “enter into a formal and legally binding agreement” and “become liable to pay (a debt),” to use two of the verb’s definitions, a debt to a debtor who, per the letters to Barry, is not to be trusted. If half of this short review seems focused on the errant paths to which such a contract may lead – and has led: H.D. to Euripides and Robert Browning to a “signal botch” (P&P 3, 224) – it is only because Pound himself has contracted the disease. Indeed, in this text Pound is only gearing up for tackling the Agamemnon: A month later, his own essay on the play would appear as part of his “Hellenist Series.”

Accursed Hel(l)enism ca. 1919

Pound’s approach in the “Hellenist Series,” appearing in the Egoist from August 1918 to April 1919, is to study the hellenisms of the past through their translations, to assess texts rather than accept pre-formed ideology (though of course his assessment itself is not ideology-free).Footnote ⁴⁵ Against “pedants yapping about the glory that was this and the grandeur that was the other,” he advocates for displaying “the same spirit of ‘readiness to judge’ wherein we read Rimbaud and Corbière” also when we read “the classics” (25). Otherwise, Pound argues, “they become mere Nelson Columns, mere monuments in the landscape – deader, indeed, than stone columns” (25). On this account, “the classics” have staked a claim on our territory – conquered it like Admiral Nelson – and we have submitted all too willingly to a now-dead threat. Much like Winckelmann, who must somewhat arbitrarily declare the end of Greek art so that something like modern art can begin, Pound sifts through the apparent pinnacles of Greek achievement only to declare them, with the potential exception of Homer, unusable if not useless, unless perhaps they are tackled through the medium of Latin. Even Sappho, though praised (“made of perfect sound”), is treated with skepticism: She is “not on that account, of necessity, a model for modern writing” – a lesson learned by experience (24, italics in original). Pound’s final move – an abrupt jump from praising an eighteenth-century English edition of Ovid’s epistles to the citation of the opening of Aeschylus’s Prometheus in a nineteenth-century Italian translation – may make some sense when seen in this light. As Pound had already determined in Lustra with respect to lyric, Greek cannot be meaningfully approached except through its Renaissance rediscovery, whose aftereffects may still be most strongly and productively felt in Italy or France (with Salel’s versions so praised in the Homer installments) but not (yet) in the English-speaking world. The “Hellenist Series” thus declares the end of hellenism even as it appears theoretically committed to its revival; from this point on, H.D., insisting on Greek, can be derided as a “narrow minded she-bard” who is only interested in “Alexandrine Greek bunk” (L 157; September 11, 1920). Such a stance undergirds Eliot’s use of Greek, qua both language and exemplum, in Poems, 1920: as a mocking counterpoint to contemporary inanities, but with no sense of nostalgia. We see the Greek Nelson pillars that imbue the poems’ implicit speakers and certainly their protagonists with a sense of decadence, but the very idealization that is performed for the establishment of this idea of decadence is itself mocked.

The sixth and last installment of Pound’s series, from which all the above pronouncements are taken, was curiously never republished; given its pessimism, perhaps it was thought to be an unfitting conclusion to a hellenist series.Footnote ⁴⁶ When collected in Instigations the following year, the series ends on a much more ambivalent note: literally on a postscript newly appended to the fifth installment focused on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. Pound himself, it would seem, is not actually ready to leave Greek behind. Before dismissing Greek tout court, Aeschylus included, in part vi, he had attempted to translate him, to test out personally, and for his time, whether he was usable. Besides the long translation of Divus – that is, Canto 1 – provided earlier in the series, Pound does not offer any of his own translations in the Homer or Sappho articles. But he does seem to do so throughout the Aeschylus section, and especially after he makes rhetorical show of returning “thankfully” from the “welter” of existing nineteenth-century English translations to Thomas Stanley’s Greek and Latin (LE 269).Footnote ⁴⁷ His treatment of these passages within the essay and in his separate, unpublished translation of the play’s opening prefigures his later turn to tragedy, thus undercutting the bombast in the series’ conclusion.

Pound sees the Agamemnon as providing a crucial link between literature and history, elevating, in the famed ἑλέναυς choral song, the mythical character of Helen into “a historical principle,” as she would be in Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The play additionally reflects this link in an intricate formal and aural pattern of the kind admired by Eliot in “Reflections on Vers Libre.” Bush rightly notes that Pound was interested in the way that Homer in particular conveys “the swing of words spoken.” This “authentic cadence of speech” is, however, only one of Homer’s sonic qualities that “remain[s] untranslated,” while another quality Pound highlights is both “untranslated and untranslatable”: “the magnificent onomatopoeia” (LE 250). Such appropriateness of language to thing is thematized in the choral song on Helen and echoed in the early Cantos: “Who was it that gave a name / so utterly appropriate – / perhaps a being we cannot see, / using language with accuracy / through his foreknowledge of what was fated?,”Footnote ⁴⁹ the Aeschylean chorus wonders. Of course what the strophe seeks to justify is a poetic sleight of hand: Aeschylus’s own puns on Helen’s name. It is the poet who makes Helen’s name appropriate. Pound’s account of both the teichoskopia scene in Iliad 3 and the Agamemnon forges a connection between specifically linguistic/aural elements and greater historical forces.

Pound’s Aeschylus essay, as well as his translation of Agamemnon’s opening, struggles to reconcile the necessity of conveying in translation “the swing of words spoken” – thus achieving the imagist “direct treatment of the thing” – and Greek sonic qualities or melopoeia – just as his Anthology poems did. Because Pound’s prime interlocutor is Browning’s “distorted” version; because he himself had poetically abandoned the search for Greek melopoeia in Ripostes for the terseness of Lustra; and perhaps even because Eliot had found his dialogue in the Noh plays less successful than his lyrics, his rhetorical emphasis is on the former, on the cadence of speech. So, he reproaches Browning for his “stilted unsayable jargon,” which both misrepresents Greek and disfigures English, failing to convey, for example, the strong emotion presumably present in the declaration of Greek victory at Troy (LE 270). Indeed, it would be Jean Cocteau’s ability to render Antigone’s lines “with all the force any man ever imagined inherent in greek [sic] originals” that made that translation permanently worthy of praise (GK 93). But Pound’s major regret regarding his own translation of Agamemnon’s opening is in fact his inability to approach Greek sound and meter; moreover, a close look at his translations within the essay itself suggests that in practice he is quite attentive to all aspects of the Greek text.

Though Pound keeps the “whole” of Agamemnon in view in his essay, he becomes mired in its particulars, implicitly pitting its musicality against directness of speech. Like the Homer sections of the “Hellenist Series,” the Aeschylus installment contains many quotations. All are passages that would return in Pound’s work, so I will treat them in some detail below, but first I’d like to provide an overview of the essay’s odd trajectory through the play. Pound understandably starts his discussion from the beginning, citing moments from the opening that he would himself translate (e.g., the account of the Greek takeover of Troy), before skipping to its climactic action: Agamemnon’s murder. Rather than end the essay there, he goes back through the play, now tracing its emotional content in significantly longer passages. We read a collation of Kassandra’s “screams” in Latin; the famous strophe from the Helen chorus (in Latin and two unidentified English versions) as well as its supplement later in the play (in Latin);Footnote ⁵⁰ sections from Klytemnestra’s monologue outlining her emotional investment in the murder because of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (in Latin, with a few lines in English); before finally circling right back to the beginning, and Klytemnestra’s description of the beacons that conveyed news of the Greek victory from Troy all throughout Greece and back to Mycenae (in Morshead’s English translation). The essay is then suddenly abandoned, the later “p.s.” indicating the author’s embarrassment at this fact: “I leave these notes, rough as they are, to indicate a block of matter needing examination” (LE 275). It’s as if the play for Pound is telling two stories simultaneously that cannot be reconciled in a critical account: one about the tragic downfall of a great leader and thus perhaps also of a particular culture, the other about the female voices that haunt any such monologic or simplified account.

The passages selected reveal Pound’s attunement to the play’s various modes: from the surprisingly metaphorical or imagistically dense to the lyrically despairing to the brazenly direct to the combination of all these in the Helen chorus. But Pound’s translation practice within the essay appears to align with a domesticating translation strategy. He finds himself capable of only conveying in his English what a strict imagistic aesthetic would choose to convey, while the bare, almost inarticulate emotional outbursts, such as those of Kassandra or Agamemnon, and other moments of sonic richness are here left aside (as they had not been in, say, the admired version of the Nishikigi cricket song). Though he rejects his own “bungling translation” of Agamemnon’s murder (to which he would return in both the Pisan Cantos and Elektra) – “This is Agamemnon, / My husband, / Dead by this hand, / And a good job. These, gentlemen, are the facts” (LE 271) – he insists on the necessity for “any natural wording” that highlights “Klutaimnestra actual, dealing with an actual situation” (LE 270).Footnote ⁵¹ He similarly argues, and provides his own English options, for something that can be “shouted” as the appropriate translation of Klytemnestra’s declaration of Greek victory at Troy earlier in the play.

Pound’s translation of the Helen chorus seems to exemplify this strategy, since he doesn’t attempt to replicate the Aeschylean puns. He cites the chorus more extensively in Stanley’s Latin (thirteen lines), then offers two similar translations (nine lines each) with no attribution and little comment.

The typescript draft of this essay clearly indicates that these are Pound’s own versions: lines are crossed out, retyped, crossed out again, or written out by hand.Footnote ⁵² In the truncated republication of the series in Instigations he adds to them a cautionary note that both acknowledges H.D.’s pivotal role in the effort of translating Greek tragedy (which he’s now joining) and critiques it: “H.D.’s translations from Euripides should be mentioned either here or in connection with ‘The New Poetry’; she has obtained beautiful strophes…. Elsewhere she retains certain needless locutions, and her versification permits too many dead stops in its current” (353). She appears to have “failed” first in the exact way that Pound would describe his own failure with Agamemnon in the Dial a few years later: “you put it [= needless locutions] in and the thing goes dead” (P&P 4, 284–85). Moreover, we see here that crucial “or” that reappears in “A Visiting Card”: Should H.D.’s choruses be discussed in the context of translations of Greek tragedy or of “‘The New Poetry’”? At this moment Pound himself doesn’t seem sure, and is thus also not sure where his own efforts with Aeschylus and with this “Hellenist Series” would fall. Is he a modernist or a hellenist? A translator or a “new poet”? For now the categories seem to overlap, and Pound is too uncertain of his own offerings as translator to even acknowledge these two versions of Aeschylus as his own.

The first version looks a little like H.D., with her strong preference in the “Choruses from Iphigeneia in Aulis” for short, adjectivally rich phrases and hyphenated compound words; so, for example, Pound has “war-wed” for the hapax legomenon δορίγαμβρον (dorigambron). But the consistent trochaic/dactylic openings are a Poundian signature, as is the persistent use of alliteration (note the s of strife traveling throughout the first translation until it’s finally replaced in the last half-line by the d slant rhyme echoing back to wed), and the visual, though not prosodic, echo of a sapphic stanza. The second version differs from the first in aural and visual rhythm rather than diction. The condensation of the first line and the parenthetical “fitly” establish the opening dactylo-trochaic rhythm more clearly: wár-wed, contésted / Hélen, destróyer of shíps; of mén. The breaking up of the stanzas into couplets highlights the slant rhymes and clarifies the trochaic reading, while at the same time isolating the images and locations present in the passage, thus laying bare its well-thought-out structure. The journey’s origin, span, and destination are brought to imagistic focus, respectively marked by curtains–land (Sparta), oars–sea (Aegean), and red leaves–Simois (Troy); this account is sandwiched between commentary on the nature of Helen (destroyer, rank flower), who, after all, occasioned the journey. The final two lines – a freer, again more clearly imagistic, translation than his first version, with the blood implied rather than stated – sound strikingly like some of Pound’s Chinese-inspired imagist poems (e.g., “The Jewel-Steps’ Grievance”). In Greek the shift into different meters for the stanza’s last three lines (Pound’s last two) turns them into “a sort of ‘ephymnium rhythmicum,’”Footnote ⁵³ which is precisely what Pound captures with his marked-off concluding lines.

In his second version Pound uses the difficult-to-translate Ἀμφινεικῆ (Amphineikē)Footnote ⁵⁴ as what he would later call the “key phrase,” or image that structures the whole piece. Stanley does not comment on the word, translating “contentionum.” The passage as excerpted by Pound begins with this “contestation” and ends on the bloody eris ‘strife’, coming full circle. So Pound emphasizes Helen’s being claimed by both sides and ends by again evoking the larger picture of love disputed (in Troy). The rest of the passage too, as made clear by Pound’s lineation in the second version, develops out of such a push-and-pull: between the enclosed room (curtains) and the breeze, the land and the sea, the river and the sea, the idea of a presumably visible track and the unseen traces, the color red and the usually green leaves, rankness and the customarily pleasant flower of love. Helen’s very name is pulled in many directions through Aeschylus’s puns. Yet, though Pound makes a point of echoing at least the hard k of Ἀμφινεικῆ throughout the translation (in “delicate-curtained,” “tracks,” and “rank,” which also reads in itself like a condensation of the Greek word, consisting of its beginning a, middle n, and final k), his interest is at this moment clearly on imagistic superposition and contrast. The lines meditating on the “right name” that introduce it, together with the Helen pun (which Pound translates semantically only through “destroyer”), are ignored, and even the “fitly” becomes parenthetical.

These translations are facilitated by Stanley’s edition: He prints no more than three Greek words per line and, unlike current editions, which cut words across lines in accordance with prevailing metrical readings, Stanley lineates important words together and translates them thus in his Latin, giving the impression of Station-of-the-Metro-esque image clusters. Moreover, though the meter is now considered as trochaic in the first few lines (681–85; only the last two are in Pound’s selection), then shifting into ionics characterized by a rising rhythm (688–95),Footnote ⁵⁵ in Stanley’s edition fewer lines switch to an anapestic opening; this explains and justifies Pound’s continuing use of a mostly falling rhythm in his translation.Footnote ⁵⁶ That is, Pound attempts some translation of melopoeia. He replicates the echo of the strophe’s meter while also adapting it; the separation into couplets and individual lines suggests different voices speaking (as would be the case in a chorus) that are nonetheless tied together sonically through the trochaic slant rhymes (cities–breezes–traces–Simois). Such subtle effects, often anchored by a key word presented in Greek (as by Ἀμφινεικῆ here), are what Pound’s choral songs in Women of Trachis thirty years later would strive for.

This second version, then, is “hellenist” and fully imagist. That is, it is not just imitatively Greek like the first “Sapphic” version, but also echoes the lessons Pound drew from Chinese: the emphasis on parallelism, condensation, and implication or inference rather than statement. In addition to marking Helen as a force of history, this strophe in Pound’s translational X-ray seems to strike all the relevant poetic notes – and even some musical ones. It may call for H.D.’s translation mode, as Pound somewhat begrudgingly implies in his Instigations note, but the tightness of its construction, which his version foregrounds, does not allow for her (or is it Euripides’?) supposed “verbosity.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Pound’s next translation is of a surprising passage: Klytemnestra’s justification of her actions through Iphigeneia. This passage is important for establishing the circularity of the “curse” of the Atreidae that would so interest Eliot, but doesn’t hit any of the motifs that interest Pound, so it is not immediately clear why he included or translated it. For one, it forges a connection back to the only decent contemporary translation of tragedy he knows: H.D.’s “Choruses from Iphigeneia in Aulis”. At the same time, it continues the mostly sympathetic portrayal of Klytemnestra that we’ve had throughout the essay. Earlier she was implicitly admired for her murderous efficiency – a position that makes sense if Agamemnon is identified with the warmongers Pound condemns so strongly in Mauberley and the Hell Cantos – and now her own motivating trauma, as well as her sarcastic temper, is revealed. In fact, Klytemnestra is the only character, other than the chorus in the song just discussed, that Pound speaks through in his English instead of citing another translation.

Klytemnestra’s sung speech is repetitive here, hitting the same theme of revenge three times in seven lines; hence Pound’s attempt to “condense.” Even so, the two lines he omits make their presence felt in what he translates. The repetition he adds – namely, the rhyme on Iphigeneia’s name – is less surprising if considered as a way to perform the meaning of the word he cuts, polyklauton ‘much-lamented,’ which might have otherwise necessitated an unwieldy compound. Similarly, his “ironic equivalent” shows his attunement to Klytemnestra’s tone as seen most clearly in the (untranslated) line 1527: ἄξια δράσας ἄξια πάσχων (“fit suffering for fit deeds”).Footnote ⁵⁸ In both cases, his condensation is also an intensification that aims to conserve as much as possible from his original. (He does of course give up entirely on the musical structure here.)

The essay ends by going back to the play’s beginning – the chain of lights – and thus fulfills the expectation of circularity that is laid out in Klytemnestra’s speech. Pound provides it without further comment in another translator’s “bearable” words – E. D. A. Morshead’s, who was able to carry this story forward, as Pound is not (LE 274).Footnote ⁵⁹ The translating experience recorded in this essay is what the Pisan Cantos will remember, but by the mid-1940s the emotional center and moral valences have swerved away from Klytemnestra as a necessary actor and even from Helen herself as a Yeatsian historical force. While the need for directness and imagistic coherence – clearly what Pound’s translations are striving for in this essay – will remain, the pressure for melopoeia and for “right naming” (the latter elided here despite being explicitly broached by Aeschylus) will grow much stronger.

“Every possible dodge”: Pound’s “Opening for an Agamemnon”

The two Agamemnon passages for which Pound offers English translations by others bracket his Aeschylus essay: Browning’s account of the fall of Troy in the beginning and Morshead’s Klytemnestran beacons at the very end. Returning to unfinished business, Pound translates exactly these sections in the unpublished “Opening for an Agamemnon,” dated by Pound “1919 or thereabouts.” The “Opening” is aggressively colloquial, as if offering a corrective to Browning’s unsayable “botch.” It is also reductive: Pound takes out over two hundred lines sung by the chorus after the watchman (renamed the “Concierge”) speaks and before Klytemnestra appears, in which they set the stage by retelling the story of the Trojan War. What he attempts in the translation is guided by his essay and by the interest he articulates there in three aspects of the Aeschylean text: directness as seen in the spoken quality of the dialogue, which gives the sense of a live drama; lexical polysemy; and musicality.

Due to the brevity of the translation, there is no opportunity for character development or for the demonstration of sympathy; still, Klytemnestra is again allowed to function indirectly as the poet’s anti-war mouthpiece, speaking ironically against those around her. Referring to a potential objection to Greek atrocities at Troy, she asks, “What cher mean? / Don’t they always do it? What’s / A war for anyhow” (119). Surprisingly, given the resonances the play will later acquire in his work, Pound omits in this opening scene the Greek herald’s claim to honor Agamemnon “above all other mortals now alive” because he has destroyed the seed (sperma) of the whole land (chthonos) of Troy.Footnote ⁶⁰ The glorification of Agamemnon would undercut the anti-war skepticism that Pound seems to want to infuse the play with in 1919; similarly, since the emphasis on the extent of destruction doesn’t lend itself easily to irony, Pound does not translate or gesture towards two of his favorite Greek words. The exact same elements – Agamemnon and his “sperm,” the chthōn,Footnote ⁶¹ and even a German tag (“Gott mit uns”) that Pound assigns here to the chorus – will be redeployed to opposite ends in the Pisan Cantos and Elektra.

Pound’s alignment with Klytemnestra is also suggested by the word which he grants her in her beacon-lights speech. Again unlike in his later Elektra, where he highlights the maternal imagery surrounding Klytemnestra, here he avoids her own reliance on such imagery for conveying the chain of lights stretching from Troy to Mycenae. For example, in Aeschylus the night is said to give birth to light, both naturally in the form of dawn (line 265) and technologically, through this network (line 279). Instead Pound has Klytemnestra only name a litany of Greek places with no comment, as if this is a roll call of the ancient world (similar to that in H.D.’s roughly contemporaneous poem “Islands”) that she is bringing to speech and thus to life (and to light). “Ain’t you never heard of the TELegraph!” she yells at the hapless chorus, using a word that embodies what it speaks of (“Opening” 119). Aeschylus’s phaos … tēlepompon (far-sent light [line 300]) is a neologism, in both species and genus: Such tēl- compounds don’t seem to have been used before to name something like a technological device.Footnote ⁶² This is an exemplary case of literature staying “NEWS,” with Aeschylus announcing the birth of the telegraph, “a system for the rapid transmission of messages by relayed visual signals,” two thousand years in advance.Footnote ⁶³ We have already seen the resonances of the telegraph in Pound’s early thought; here its alignment with translation becomes more explicit. As Tiffany puts it, “the original arrives from a distant realm of secrecy and silence…. All translation, in this respect, is telegraphic; whatever reaches us does so from afar,” and so it reaching us at all is “nothing short of miraculous.”Footnote ⁶⁴ What succeeds in getting transmitted in the “Opening” is less the coming of Agamemnon – the translation stops too soon for that anyway – but the fact of Aeschylus’s Greece itself, in its geographic specificity. That it’s the ambivalent figure of Klytemnestra who reads the telegraphic message – ecstatic at the news but only so that she can finally undo “the glory that was Greece” herself – may also have attracted the equally ambivalent Pound.

Indeed, Pound’s other noteworthy word choice in this scene provides a much less optimistic account of the transmission of other voices. We are now in the part of the passage that was given in Browning’s translation in the essay: “Troia do the Achaioi hold, this same day. / I think a noise – no mixture – reigns i’ the city / Sour wine and unguent pour thou in one vessel.”Footnote ⁶⁵ There Pound doesn’t re-translate the last two lines, but makes two proposals for the first: the more literal “Troy is the Greeks’,” which he rejects as “an ambiguity for the ear,” and “Know that our men are in Ilion” (LE 268). In his “Opening” he settles for the emphatic and shoutable “The Greeks are IN!,” while the following lines are more innovatively rendered: “There’s a mix up in Troy town tonight, a salad / There is, and some dressin’, some racket!” (119). The Greek likens the boēn amikton (line 321), the unmixed (and unmixable, fundamentally different) noise or racket of the winners’ and losers’ screams, to oil and vinegar keeping apart if poured in the same vessel.Footnote ⁶⁶ Pound’s mixed-up salad, besides being an apt interpolation given the alimentary metaphor and the screams of the hungry Greeks, reflects also the mixing of a common word for wine/vinegar (oxos) and a rare one for anointing oil (aleiphar, a Homeric word). Pound’s “dressin’” and “racket” are, in contrast, common words. Each, though, has multiple contexts of signification: “dress,” a range of meanings including a specifically military one which is no doubt evoked here, “racket,” two distinct definitions arising from distinct etymologies. This “salad” is not only the result of irreconcilable differences between languages (even if they are languages of screams or “noise”), but also, within Greek and within English, an indicator of the absence of transparency in a single language. Fittingly, the very next word in Pound is an attempt at an interlingual pun that would mix the languages after all. Having named the “House of Atreus” a few lines above, he now describes the racket in Troy as “ATrocities” (119). This multilingualism, whose existence and necessity Pound would frequently note,Footnote ⁶⁷ runs the danger, however, of plunging the poet into the abyss of language (as Benjamin said of Hölderlin), or of disintegrating into a word salad – which may be the reason why neither this translation nor that of Elektra was ever published.

When Pound reflects on his attempt to translate the Agamemnon in his February 1923 “Paris Letter” for the Dial, he does so in terms of such a failure, specifically focusing on the inability to reflect Greek sound. In contrast to his earlier, more reserved praise for the play and for Aeschylus, now Pound claims that “The Agamemnon drives one to admiration; it is a great work” (P&P 4, 284). Yet, when he juxtaposes his own Agamemnon with Jean Cocteau’s “heroic attempt” in translating Sophocles’ Antigone, he reveals his ambivalence once again and elaborates on the difficulties of translation. On the one hand, he praises Cocteau for his radical condensation of Sophocles’ play. But on the other, he draws our attention to the importance of the seemingly superfluous, of what Cocteau has, presumably, given up on:

Pound sees the Greek as too much and too little, or too good and too faulty. What in Greek served either the “melodic value” (LE 273) or the theatrical transmission of emotional intensity – the repetition of the Greek takeover of Troy or Klytemnestra’s roundabout justifications of the murder – turns into ornament when translated, into a no longer vital excess of archaism that kills the translator’s mother tongue. But this is only one side of the story. Even near the end of the 1919 Aeschylus essay and despite his advocating throughout for reductions in translation, Pound had clarified that it was “a reading version” which “might omit various things” (for example, the verbosity, the syntactic agglutination), while those same “things” would nonetheless be useful “if the English were actually to be sung on stage, or chanted to the movements of the choric dance or procession” (LE 273). That is, were Pound to overcome his resistance to the theater and think of the plays qua plays, with the potential to transfix their audience as Sarah Bernhardt had transfixed him, his whole view of them could be utterly transformed.

Pound had been thinking about prosody in the year after the “Hellenist Series,” renewing his 1912 call for the necessity of experimentation with quantitative meter. Though he granted that “the laws of Greek quantitative prosody do not correspond with an English reality” (as the Abbé Rousselot’s phonograph had definitively shown according to Pound), he still maintained that, despite the inevitable failure, “no English poet has seriously tried to write quantitative verse without by this effort improving his cadence.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Pound suggests that a rite of passage through the foreign and especially the Greek (similar to his own in Ripostes) is necessary for English poets. By becoming aware of what is impossible in English, they might also realize what is possible beyond the iambic pentameter – especially since the phonograph had also supposedly proven that English prosodic “rules” have “no sort of relation to spoken reality.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The reason, that is, for this re-examination of prosody is not merely stylistic. Meter and matter are intertwined: “the best MECHANISM for breaking up … literary idiom IS a different meter, the god damn iambic magnetizes certain verbal sequences.”Footnote ⁷⁰

It is in this light that we should read Pound’s assessment of his Agamemnon. He regrets that rather than (re)produce the “‘vital equation’” – the quoted phrase comes from Pound’s own vorticist manifesto in GB, where he calls the image an “equation” – of the original, in which all the parts fall into place, he produces a text that fails to convey the unified, cohering whole because it is composed of fragments of artificially glued-together echoes of Greek that do not convey the “rush of the action” or the urgency of “Kassandra’s continual shrieking” (GB 92; LE 267). Pound would later write to Mary Barnard that

Pound presents his difficulties with Aeschylus primarily in terms of a struggle with the living voice: “I tried every possible dodge, making the watchman a negro, and giving him a fihn Geoogiah voyce; making the chorus talk cockney, et cetera. This is a usual form of evasion in modern drama. Ibsen makes his people provincial … to get a ‘language’” (P&P 4, 284). The use of dialect may reinvigorate a stilted, overly literary mother tongue; but it is an evasion since, as Michael North has argued, it stems from a conservative impulse to return to one’s own “authentic” linguistic roots, rather than open up to otherness.Footnote ⁷² Yet the “fihn Geoogiah voice” signals not only Pound’s attempt to superficially and problematically embody his characters, but primarily his attempt to reproduce “the prosody.” In 1920, he would lament the difficulty of “indicating the exact tone and rhythm with which one’s verse is to be read.”Footnote ⁷³ In the 1919 “Opening,” the transcription of a putative Black pronunciation had offered one solution to this problem: It served as a visual or written means to clarify the lengths of vowels in English monosyllables.Footnote ⁷⁴ His sonic translation strategy is most evident in the very beginning of the watchman’s speech, a passage that does not feature in Pound’s Aeschylus essay, where this concern with sound had been somewhat suppressed. For example, in the lines “Dey keep me up hyear lak a dawg / teh bark at de con-sterlations,” “to” has the lengthening aspirant attached to it; “dog” (and later “god”) is done with two letters to make the vowel register as long; the syllables in “constellations” are more clearly distinguished to allow for easier scanning (“Opening,” 118–19). Pound’s Agamemnon is a disaster by his own admission precisely because such transcriptions will not work consistently, especially if they appropriate a dialect from a cultural and historical context that does not fit the play’s own. This is where the TELegraph becomes a racket, and Pound, having contracted the Atreidae, fails his side of the contract: The Agamemnon (and Agamemnon) will lie “dead by this hand” until the Pisan Cantos.

Inventing Cocteau

At the end of his February 1923 “Paris Letter,” Pound outlines his own version of hellenism, echoing the terms of that never-republished final segment of the “Hellenist Series”: “the classics will live as long as people can take their symbols as equivalent of some current struggle which they are unable to treat more directly, or with greater exactness of balance despite the baggage” (P&P 4, 287). It is the contemporary context that imbues the “classic” with (use) value (as H.D. was already showing through her Sappho), and translation may be a second-rate enterprise, a last resort only if one cannot treat the current matter directly or imagistically.Footnote ⁷⁵ His suggestion for translation then would be what he himself claimed to have done in his Homage to Sextus Propertius (and what he may have been trying to replicate with his Klytemnestra): Zooming in on and perhaps enhancing the Roman poet’s anti-imperialist stance to mirror his own hostility towards the British Empire, Pound recreates the ancient “symbol” by finding a signified that would fit the text’s signifier.Footnote ⁷⁶ These are exactly the terms in which Pound praises Cocteau’s adaptations of tragedy into what he calls “the ‘modern equivalent,’” as against his own (P&P 4, 285).

Cocteau sought to translate Antigone as if attempting to “photograph Greece from an aeroplane.”Footnote ⁷⁷ He specified that the chorus – reduced in the first production, per Pound’s description, to “a set of masks, hung over a canvas temple” and a megaphone voiced by Cocteau himself (P&P 4, 285) – should speak quickly, “as if reading a newspaper article.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In 1923 Pound emphasizes the imagist principles undergirding Cocteau’s version – condensation, rapidity, “simple and direct speech” – which presumably allow him to mostly get beyond the “pasteboard and glue” (P&P 4, 285, 287). He thus succeeds in bringing forth the play’s image, encapsulated in a key phrase that, as Pound would later claim, “rings out in the Paris play house with all the force any man ever imagined inherent in greek [sic] originals” (GK 93). This line forges the crucial link to the present moment:

“The control” thinks of itself as the standard, and thus any appeal to something else is relegated to the status of novelty or invention when in fact, as much in Antigone’s case as in Cocteau’s, the “new” thing is actually quite old. So, Antigone tells Creon that the unwritten rules of the immortals which she defends “sont de toujours.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In broadcasting these words again in Paris in 1922, Cocteau makes a similar case for the “eternal” words of Sophocles as well. By 1935’s “Cocteau Sociologist,” and apropos of the Frenchman’s version of Oedipus in La machine infernale, Pound principally admires Cocteau because of “the amount of his time he contains” (SP 436). But it is still Antigone’s advocacy for the established yet forgotten rites that becomes proof of his inventive power, the mark of the playwright’s own great achievement: “Neither Yeats nor Pirandello could attain the: ‘T’as inventé la justice.’ in Cocteau’s Antigone” (SP 435).Footnote ⁸⁰

The French dramatist is further celebrated as a man who acts, now in contrast to the passive Pound and Eliot; the locus of competition is not drama or poetry, but Greek.

Cocteau’s chorus reading quickly from the ancient Greek newspaper is now proof that literature is “news that STAYS news,” Antigone as much of an ephèbe as she ever was, while Cocteau himself remains “the livest thing in Paris 1933” (433). Pound seems to assume – quoting Rémy de Gourmont in French – that Cocteau is able to achieve his much-vaunted “concision” (“limpidity” in Pound’s English translation of Gourmont) because of his “perfect acquaintance” with Greek (Gourmont actually says “l’abondance des idées”) (435). Pound’s somewhat inaccurate translation of Gourmont leads to an erratic series of remarks:

Cocteau reaches limpidity because he knows Greek so well that he can be like an airplane flying over the text – offering what Walter Benjamin would call “Kritik” – instead of stumbling through it, prodding and poking every word, like Pound, who at best would (did?) produce a commentary.Footnote ⁸¹ But then knowledge of Greek seems irrelevant to the nature of Cocteau’s achievement, and is in fact separated from the drama itself, which, Pound seems to imply here, exceeds the language that it’s written in. Having thus undercut his own reasoning for his failure to transform “father Aeschylus” into an “ephèbe,” he turns it into a problem of audience reception: Unlike Pound, Cocteau is perceived as knowing enough Greek (including by Pound himself just now, who forgot his French in order to convey this potentially mistaken impression), and so no one slings mud at him when he attempts to radically interpret Sophocles.

Already in a 1921 review of Cocteau’s poetry, prior to the Antigone, Pound had somewhat surprisingly articulated the distinction between their literary aims in terms of Greek.

Cocteau’s distant reading, his “quality of perceptive intelligence,” is what allows him to penetrate Sophocles’ play and convey it in a way that is appropriate to the Paris of 1922, just as in his poetry he “gives the feel of the age; and indicates the mode and modality of its hurrying ideation.” But as the 1923 “Paris Letter” on Aeschylus implies, and this poetry review makes clear, there is a trade-off. Though he conveys the Greek force in French, Cocteau misses both the Greek and presumably the French words in their specificity, cultivating the rapid sliding – “the dance of the intellect” – from one to the next that characterizes logopoeia, rather than the sonic resonances of melopoeia: “As melopoeia possibly nil, yet logopoeia certainly,” Pound’s 1921 review opens. What Cocteau provides, then, does not “contain the whole of art,” and, the review concludes in the same conspiratorial tones in which it began, implicitly insisting on the value of close (Greek) reading: “you and I are very possibly against the age” that Cocteau both embodies and represents so well. By the time tragedy and Cocteau resurface contiguously in his prose over a decade after the “Paris Letter,” Pound’s view of art has changed; his insistence on what could be construed as art for art’s sake has subsided, while “action” is emphasized. As a result he is less ambivalent about Cocteau’s contributions, and more polemical in his argument for Cocteau’s success with Greek tragedy through distant reading. Indeed, Pound seems ready to take a page from Cocteau’s (and in fact Eliot’s) playbook and not read that closely himself. For the pillar in the foundation of his monument to Cocteau turns out to have been Pound’s own invention.

“T’as inventé la justice,” the line Pound returns to again and again, is actually not to be found in Cocteau’s Antigone.Footnote ⁸³ The closest we get to it is not through Creon but through the chorus. They are the ones to tell Antigone that “C’est ta faute. Tu as violenté la justice. Tu payes encore pour Oedipe.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The passage is more sympathetic and less accusatory in Greek, where the chorus focus less on Antigone’s violation (and Cocteau’s violenter is even stronger than that) of Creon’s laws and more on her own self-violation at the feet of justice (lines 853–56). Pound’s misreading – or, more likely, mishearing – aligns with how he wanted to understand the play, both in 1923 and in 1935, as representing the revolutionary cry of the individual against the state. And he wanted to see it, despite its tragic contours, in a constructive light: Antigone as the promoter of ancient values and Cocteau as the (re-)inventor of a new-old possibility for justice. But Cocteau is more cynical than that and amplifies Antigone’s status as an oppositional figure (with respect to Creon, but also to everyone else onstage) – and in this case as a “violator” or even “rapist” – without suggesting there is anything constructive there besides the mere fact of opposition. (The Pléiade editors, for example, emphasize this Antigone’s “anarchism.”)Footnote ⁸⁵ The line is a “key phrase” because, in Pound’s remembered hearing, it both encapsulates the spirit of the play (embodying Creon’s ignorance/blindness, Antigone’s opposition, and her adherence to an old/new law), and its translator’s/interpreter’s intervention. That the line itself exists only in Pound’s faulty memory fittingly marks his own contribution to this interpretive chain where the old becomes new, and the violence inherent in that process (whether to the potentially valid perspective that Creon or the chorus represent, or to Antigone herself, or, outside the play’s plot, to Sophocles’ play on Cocteau’s part) is blotted out, and re-branded as invention. In 1935, this is no longer a problem for Pound, at least publicly, and indeed is proof that, as he puts it in 1938’s Guide to Kulchur, “greek drama exists,” despite his, Eliot’s, H.D.’s, and Gilbert Murray’s failures, because Cocteau’s “sheer genius has resurrected it” (93).

Sweeney and the “silent man in mocha brown”

Though Pound remained haunted by his failure of Agamemnonic translation, Eliot had dispatched Agamemnon much more readily in the late 1910s. The play remains a touchstone for him through the 1930s, but he is both less conflicted about its value and less interested in its textual resurrection. His transmutation of the play in “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” a poem arising out his close collaboration with Pound, enables him to lay out a future pathway of approach to Greek tragedy that falls between Greek with tears (to amend Eliot’s own formulation; see p. 99 above) and the lowly, inadequate art of translation. Like Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” much of Eliot’s Poems, 1920, in which “Nightingales” was published, interrogates the impact of history (be it artistic, social, or religious) on contemporary praxis. Unlike in Yeats’s “Leda,” the “brute blood of the air” is not quite as masterful. The (dis)connection between the past and the present is usually framed more precisely as a tension between a contemporary or in any case later idealized projection of the past and an unblinkered view of a decaying, vulgar, or “dry” present. So, for example, “Sweeney Erect” (P 36–37) begins with the demand for a neoclassical painting of rocks, seas, and mythological figures. The specific instructions for the scene, however, already hint at our speaker’s attitudes towards this prospect: The setting is a “cavernous waste shore” “in the unstilled Cyclades,” so unstilled in fact that the sea itself has become Scylla (“snarled and yelping”). The figures involved are defeated by their own powers: Aeolus “review[s]” winds that are “insurgent,” Ariadne’s hair is “tangle[d],” and Nausicaa’s morning stirrings doom her to a meeting not with kingly Odysseus but with the Cyclops Polyphemus. From this only seemingly idyllic landscape that is demanded of art (as deceptive as Theseus’s “perjured sails,” also mentioned), we move to a present indicative description of Sweeney qua “orang-outang” rising “from the sheets in steam.” The past isn’t only thematically addressed in the volume, but materially as well; most clearly in poems like “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” and “Gerontion,” the verse is formed by a tissue of quotations, fragments shored against the poet’s wartime and postwar ruins. This version of the burden of the past is the inverse of the “perjured” neoclassicism because it is nearly imperceptible.

“Sweeney among the Nightingales” (P 51–52) registers a sense of the past in both of these ways, by framing the plight of Sweeney and/or of the “silent man in mocha brown” through Agamemnon, whose dying cry appears as the epigraph, and who is mentioned by name in the last stanza. The implication is not only that Sweeney’s doings are not as significant as Agamemnon’s – there does not even seem to be a murder, which in the Yeatsian context would count as a disappointment – but also that Agamemnon, lecherous husband of Klytemnestra coming home with his concubine Kassandra, famous for sacrificing his own daughter and for having caused the deaths of thousands by claiming Briseis from Achilles, was probably a Sweeney. Besides the explicit reference to Aeschylus and the deployment of the ultimate poetic trope of the nightingale,Footnote ⁸⁶ the poem contains possible allusions to Kipling, Schubert, Marlowe, Milton, alongside borrowings from lesser-known contemporary sources.Footnote ⁸⁷ This isn’t a world of lack, but of surfeit. There are too many words, too many bodies, too many stories, and none of them meaningful: “polyphiloprogenitive … superfetation of τὸ ἕν,” to quote “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” (P 49).

Eliot later insisted on publicly calling the poem a “modern painting, abstract and impersonal,” a “still life” or “a series of images,”Footnote ⁸⁸ thus aligning it with, for example, Pound’s own presentation of his cantos around this time as “images” from a long poem. In typical Eliotic fashion, he resisted any easy analogies between the images presented and the mythical backdrop, and did so even privately: In the margins of a scholarly book that proposed Rachel as Klytemnestra and the man in mocha brown as Orestes, he is reported to have written “nonsense” (P 541). Yet dismissing the Aeschylean frame obscures the poem’s touted “seriousness.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The most productive way to read it, I think, is in terms of the interactions of its details with the Agamemnon and tragedy more broadly. The poem already functions as Eliot’s response to Pound’s request (whether pre-emptively or consciously makes little difference) that he translate the Agamemnon and provides the pattern for Eliot’s subsequent treatment of Greek materials, exceeding the ironic interplay between opposed realms that the rest of the volume operates within. The Oresteia as a whole is a perfect set of plays through which to think about the relation between past and present in the life of an individual, as well as about the constitution of a community or a polity, and that is how Eliot uses it from 1918 until The Family Reunion twenty years later.

Like other poems in the volume, “Nightingales” originally had an Elizabethan epigraph in addition to the Aeschylean one: “Why should I speak of the nightingale? The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong.”Footnote ⁹⁰ De-emphasizing the orientation towards “adultery” and “adulteration” – the former unavoidable in any poem featuring Agamemnon, the latter part of the decadence motifs featured throughout Poems, 1920 – Eliot draws our attention away from questions of morality or pathos to the words of the Greek epigraph itself: ὤμοι, πέπληγμαι καιρίαν πληγὴν ἔσω (line 1343). It is left untranslated, but two key features reverberate in the poem: its last word, ἔσω (esō) ‘in, inside,’ and the polyptoton of πέπληγμαι (peplēgmai) ‘I am struck’ and πληγήν (plēgēn) ‘strike, blow, wound.’ Agamemnon’s dying exclamation works in two ways. It is both a description of his state – he is literally struck “inside,” stabbed – and a moment of illumination; he realizes that the danger he thought was outside (in the war, or the journey back) and had been overcome was actually lurking inside the house. “Nightingales” itself is a poem about boundaries and their crossing: limits of space but also of the self. After the initial, species-crossing description of “Apeneck Sweeney” with “zebra-stripe[d]” jaw “swelling to maculate giraffe,” the poem shifts to the sky (“the circles of the stormy moon”), its bird’s-eye view encompassing South America (“the River Plate”) and “the shrunken seas,” zooms in to the house where the poem’s events take place, then exits again to the natural space of “the bloody wood.” The two female protagonists are inside, but the rest of the characters are positioned at thresholds or points of entry: Sweeney “guards the horned gate,” the man in mocha brown is initially “at the window-sill” and then outside the window, the waiter “brings in oranges,” the “host” is “at the door.” Both central male figures attempt to extend their own boundaries: Sweeney “spreads his knees” too much (given that the person trying to sit on his knees falls down), the silent man “sprawls,” but then “contracts.”

The rhetorical device of the polyptoton is a way of dramatizing that tension between inside and outside on the level of the word by presenting it in various grammatical forms. But in the way that Eliot transforms it in his poem, it also becomes a way of embodying the question of the relationship between past and present. Like almost all the poems in the volume, “Nightingales” is rhymed abcb; twice the unrhymed sound in a stanza’s first line returns in a later stanza, once becoming the rhymed sound. In an echo of the part–whole form the polyptoton structure takes in πληγήν–πέπληγμαι, exactly half of Eliot’s rhyme pairs rhyme a monosyllabic with a disyllabic word, including the first and last ones: laugh–giraffe, aloud–shroud.Footnote ⁹¹ In addition to this strong rhyme patterning, g’s are especially prominent (in words like “giraffe,” “guards,” “gate,” “gloomy,” “gambit,” “golden,” “grin,” and in the rhymes of “gapes–grapes,” and “league–fatigue”), surely to build up to both “nightingale” and “Agamemnon,” which will appear at the end of the poem, but also to echo the repeated Greek gamma in the epigraph. Several words are repeated (“knees,” “window,” “brown,” “silent,” “grapes,” “cape,” “man”), and those that don’t repeat exactly still have their sounds rearranged as the poem moves along, as seen most clearly in s-words (perhaps to echo ἔσω): Sweeney – spreads – stripes – swelling – circles – slide – shrunken seas – Spanish – sit – slips – she – stocking – silent – sprawls – sill – silent – she – suspect – circumscribe – singing – sacred – sang – siftings – stain – stiff – shroud. Nothing appears in the body of the poem without eerily making its presence felt again, and that is especially true of the haunting sound of Greek that so obsessed Pound. The past is inescapable even on the minutest level.

Similarly to this chain of slightly shifting sounds, the Aeschylean parallels are also just slightly shifted. Sweeney guards the gate, so he is the equivalent of the Mycenean watchman, on whom the play opens. Aeschylus compares him to a dog (kynos dikēn, line 3, a phrase that will echo throughout Pound’s work), and so in the course of Eliot’s first stanza he becomes an ape, a zebra, and a giraffe. As Agamemnon’s watchman looks at the sky, hoping to see, then seeing “the signal-flame” (line 8) transmitted from Troy to Greece, so the poem takes us on a tour of the night sky, and shows us the “circles” of the significance-laden “stormy moon” appropriately moving “westward.” As the watchman moans and cries for the misfortunes of the house of Atreus (line 18), so the poem records “Death and the Raven” and “Gloomy Orion.” The watchman’s speech ends surprisingly: Though he has seen the light and is rushing to announce the news to Klytemnestra, he hints that this is not the end of the house’s troubles. But a proverbial ox is on his tongue, and he chooses to remain silent on the details (lines 36–37). In Eliot we are told that “Gloomy Orion and the Dog” are in fact “veiled,” while the seas are “hushed.”

The gender of “the person in the Spanish cape” that attempts to seduce Sweeney – who despite not having been recorded as moving, seems now to form part of the “inside” scene, sliding into the role of Agamemnon – is withheld for five lines, as may be fitting for “manly” Klytemnestra.Footnote ⁹² The famous purple cloths that she lays down for Agamemnon (lines 908–10) make a parodic appearance here in the guise of the “table cloth” that “the person in the Spanish cape” pulls on to steady herself as she falls from Sweeney’s knees. The second of the two ladies “thought to be in league” appears later and, unlike the first woman’s attempt at action, “Rachel née Rabinovitch” only “Tears at the grapes with murderous paws” – much like Aegisthus who makes his appearance late and is mocked by the chorus for not having the courage to execute the murder himself (line 1635) despite his claims of being its mastermind. Unlike Klytemnestra, moreover, Aegisthus is consistently feminized in tragedy, including in Agamemnon, where the chorus first address him as “woman” (line 1625). The odd use of Rachel’s maiden name without a last name recalls the typical Greek use of patronymics (note too that Eliot has selected a maiden name, Rabinovitch, that could be broadly recognized as meaning “child of”),Footnote ⁹³ which is especially relevant in this case since Aegisthus claims to be avenging his father in conspiring to murder Agamemnon.Footnote ⁹⁴ The (adapted) Aeschylean setup is thus complete.

Yet the poem is equally interested in the “silent man in mocha brown,” who is the only one to undergo some kind of development. His initial “sprawl” suggests he is eager to take in the scene – he “gapes,” though whether he is looking in or out the window isn’t clear – and to be absorbed in it, as evidenced in the loss of his somewhat specific qualities when he becomes a “silent vertebrate in brown” (my emphasis). But he is then quickly transformed into “the man with heavy eyes” who “contracts, and concentrates, withdraws,” as if he’s seen this play before and is both wary and weary of extending himself into it. So, knowing that the danger is “in,” he “Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,” and “Leaves the room.” He doesn’t go far. Instead, he chooses to become a proper spectator: He “reappears / Outside the window, / leaning in,” his “golden grin” framed by “Branches of wistaria.” No one in the Aeschylean story “declines the gambit”; everyone, even the absent Orestes, is catastrophically drawn in (much as Sweeney is in the poem). The one(s) looking in through the window at this unfolding drama are us, the modern audience. The modern – and not ancient – audience, because what the last few stanzas depict is a gradual loss of interest: The characters no longer have names and are barely discernible (“The host with someone indistinct / Converses”), and thus easily metaphorized (“The nightingales are singing”), whether comically (nightingale = prostitute) or tragically (nightingale = Philomel/Kassandra/the poet).

The transformation of the man from “silent vertebrate” with “heavy eyes” to a stylized, somewhat Dionysian figure presiding over the scene heightens the theatrical connotations; after all, he is also framed, circumscribed, by both window and ivy-substituting wisteria. At the same time, he now recalls Eliot’s other Priapian outsider: Mr. Apollinax, who was last seen “grinning over a screen / with seaweed in [his] hair” in Prufrock and Other Observations (P 25). Whatever is happening inside thus becomes an equivalent of “the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus” or the house of “Professor Channing-Cheetah.” Whereas Mr. Apollinax enters and disturbs the universe with his “dry and passionate talk” (“‘But after all what did he mean?’” “‘He must be unbalanced,’” the other participants exclaim), the man’s disturbance here is the opposite. He exits and lets the situation unfold as it must and will, the present falling into the pattern of the past – Sweeney does after all sit at the gate of horn, which suggests that his premonitions are “true.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The silent man leaves discussion of the “nonsense” to the Channing-Cheetahs, much as Eliot himself declines to enter into Pound’s translational struggles with Aeschylus. The poem, that is, in this reading, dramatizes Eliot’s own relationship to the ancient play: There are only blows to be felt if one engages with the details within. (No Greek without tears after all.)

The specific relation between present and past thus continues to be left ambiguous in the last stanzas: The nightingales “are singing” now and “sang within the bloody wood,” but the line and stanza breaks that intervene between those two statements, as well as the absence of any markers of continuity or resemblance (e.g., “as they sang” or “are still singing”) suggest at best that the relation between those two acts of singing is yet to be determined, and at worst, that there is no relation except for near-contiguity. However, despite his dismissal as “nonsense” of the alignments between his poem’s characters and those of Aeschylus, Eliot did seem eager for another mythical element to be noticed: namely, his displacement of the murder, or at least the body of Agamemnon, from the bath (mentioned in the volume’s previous poem, where the last stanza depicts Sweeney as he “shifts from ham to ham / Stirring the water in his bath”) to the “bloody wood” in this poem’s last stanza.Footnote ⁹⁶ Perhaps Eliot sought to draw attention to it because this is the poem’s final outing, and its potential source of positive meaning. His Agamemnon’s murder takes place outside and is public rather than private, a performance for the benefit of an audience that the poem has already constructed through its nondescript man-in-brown-turned-Dionysus – as of course all the participants would be in accounts of Dionysiac ritual by Nietzsche and then Harrison. This final stanza could, then, function as the last step in the Dionysian–Harrisonian vegetation ritual that Eliot is staging, where the intricacies of plot and language don’t much matter. The old king/god has been sacrificed, the body has been planted – covered over but also potentially fertilized by centuries of lyrical (“liquid”) siftings – and we are all waiting to see whether it has “begun to sprout” as it did in the past (to quote from the end of The Waste Land i; P 57).Footnote ⁹⁷

Eliot gestures to both the Oresteia’s end, where the sacred grove of the Eumenides is established, and also to the later Oedipus at Colonus, which takes place at that grove – and indeed, this is the image evoked at the conclusion of Eliot’s last play, The Elder Statesman. He thus highlights the potential role of drama in sanctifying space and constructing a political or communal identity out of many disparate strands: just as Furies and Olympians are reconciled, just as Oedipus finds a final resting place and his native Thebes/Corinth are both succored by Athens, and just as the Mycenean Agamemnon saga and the Theban Oedipus saga become connected in this very Athenian form of Greek tragedy that pulled all myths to itself. (And, of course, in Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot would transpose it all to an actual sacred site; there too, though the murder happens indoors, the chorus speak of “the blood of Thy martyrs and saints” which “Shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places,” and “the sanctity shall not depart from it” [CPP 221].) But if a reinvigoration of ritual or of art is to take place – and the poem is not suggesting that it will, given the cutting critique present in the entire volume of Poems, 1920 and the fact that, unlike in Eliot’s book of essays The Sacred Wood, the wood here is still “bloody” – the way towards it is not by going in deep, but by staying out.Footnote ⁹⁸ After all, it may have been Agamemnon who “cried aloud” in his hard-to-parse Greek, but it is his “stiff dishonoured shroud” that we have: the shroud that the nightingales (whether poetic or not) build their edifice upon, and the “shroud” of his Greek, too, since, according to Eliot, we cannot hope to access a “native” or living understanding of the language (and thus the Greek of the epigraph remains as a kind of symbol of what once was).Footnote ⁹⁹ Eliot’s dismissal of specific parallels with the Agamemnon makes sense in this context; “Nightingales” is a poem almost proudly not using Agamemnon, declining to enter its particular world, while retaining some interest in the ritual form it embodies and exemplifies. This is precisely how Eliot would treat Greek drama for the next forty years.

“What is to be our philosophy?”: Pound and Eliot’s Dramatic Rapprochement in the 1930s

The Agamemnon resonates throughout Eliot’s work of this period. As with tragedy more broadly in his Noh review, it is against this play that he often hones his ideas about both poetry and the theater, attempting to “draw sustenance from the dead” while maintaining some critical distance. It is the Agamemnon that serves as one of his main examples for the artistic process of transmutation of emotion in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Compared to Dante’s, the Aeschylean transmutation is incomplete: “In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator” (just as it does in “Nightingales”) (CP 2, 110). There is still too much possible identification, too much personality left over in the translation from world to work. Aeschylean drama may be fundamentally formal – enacted between styles of utterance – rather than psychological or character-based: “every style of utterance in the play bears a relation to the whole and because of this relation is dramatic in itself” (CP 2, 504). But even so, “the words which we read, are symbols, a shorthand … for the actual and felt play, which is always the real thing” (CP 3, 197). In this account, what Greek drama points to is a concrete reality of “life”; it is admired because it manages to do so with relatively limited means and with reliance on form, in contrast to the elaborate, naturalistic sets and stagings of modern plays. But for Eliot’s own purposes in the 1920s, the Roman drama of Seneca might be preferable for it is more formal still; there “the drama is all in the word, and the word has no further reality behind it” (CP 3, 197). Seneca dispenses with even that implied reality behind Greek plays, stimulating the audience’s imaginative and perhaps religious faculties even more fully. We see in such statements the roots of Eliot’s later distant reading of Greek tragedy in his own plays. He offers an X-ray of the plot – as a formal structure that is guaranteed to “work” since it has held people’s attention for two thousand years – over which new words are “made flesh.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Eliot’s next attempt to convert the Agamemnon to poetic use – and to get beyond it – falls along these lines: The fragmentary Sweeney Agonistes is a highly stylized, verbally and musically inventive “Aristophanic comedy.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Notwithstanding the difference in form, there are still Aeschylean overtones to the play. The epigraph is from the Libation Bearers, the next play in the Oresteia, but the citation is in English, doubly marking Eliot’s need for a definitive exit from Greek: “You don’t see them, you don’t – but I see them: / they are hunting me down, I must move on” (CPP 74, my emphasis). Similarly his Sweeney, though continuous with the Sweeney of Poems, 1920 and still (intentionally) lacking in psychological depth, has acquired a modicum of self-awareness and a stronger sense of his entrapment in a fallen world. The play’s language is occasionally akin to that Pound was trying on for his translation of Agamemnon’s opening, though without the distortions in spelling that would force a particular kind of quantitative reading and without the violent jamming together of registers. But Eliot has also hit upon another compositional strategy that would prove important to Pound. Richards traces the play’s main takeaway – namely, Sweeney’s insistence that “life is death” – to Aristophanes, in whose metatheatrical Frogs Dionysus teases Euripides with a line from one of his own plays: τὸ ζῆν μέν ἐστι κατθανεῖν (“living is dying,” the opposite refrain from Pound’s Elektran “the / DEAD / don’t / DIE”).Footnote ¹⁰² If this is the case, Eliot is doing exactly what Pound would praise in Cocteau and seek to do himself: developing a play out of and through the translation of a single image and “moral conviction,” or key phrase. Indeed, despite Pound’s initial skepticism about the turn to “Aristophane” in the Waste Land letters of 1922, when the two fragments of Sweeney are published for the first time in October 1926/January 1927, he writes approvingly to Eliot (L-TSE 3, 644), and subsequently refers to this text as the high-water mark of Eliot’s theatrical achievement.

But Eliot succeeds – if he does – because he pays little attention to other words or elements of his “originals.” In using this Aristophanic line, in which the god of tragedy essentially condemns the last tragedian, Eliot once again declines the gambit. Greek drama, if followed even as closely (yet still loosely) as Sweeney Agonistes follows it, leads to the dead end in which the characters find themselves at the end of the second fragment – “And perhaps you’re alive / And perhaps you’re dead” – before language disintegrates and terror materializes in the form of a final series of “KNOCK”s on the door (CPP 85). They remain stuck in a world where the necessary cleansing evoked by St. John of the Cross in the play’s second epigraph cannot yet take place. But even if in this play the characters cannot get from being pursued by the Furies to the divestment from earthly things, the coexistence of both epigraphs in English – this forceful, difference-muting conjunction of distinct theologies, times, and languages – points the way. This conjunction, more than anything stylistic or formal in Sweeney Agonistes itself, will guide Eliot’s later approach to the Eumenides in The Family Reunion.

In 1933 Sweeney was published in book form and performed at Vassar in Eliot’s presence. Aware of this Aristophanic resurgence and having received from Eliot a program for The Rock in May 1934, Pound returns to drama himself.Footnote ¹⁰³ He finds his discarded Agamemnon opening while correcting his Aeschylus essay for the 1934 publication of Make It New: Essays, and seems to send it on to Eliot; he even teasingly asks Eliot if he has the “beanopoly” on dramatic verse.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The essay bears a note, dated 1934, in which Pound emends his translation of Klytemnestra’s declaration of murder to “I did it. That’s how it is,” continuing to show interest in her particular voice (LE 270). The change betrays Cocteau’s influence: His Antigone admits to burying Polynices in the similarly declarative “Je l’ai fait. Je le déclare.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Klytemnestra’s line in Greek even concludes one of the Chinese Cantos also being composed at that time. Here, however, the shift in emphasis towards the values of Elektra and the Pisan Cantos has begun; the line is used to underline an unjust murder, which the peace-bringing, rebel-suppressing son, who “remembered his father / dead by the hand of Litse,” may avenge (58/323). That nothing more came of this second look at the Agamemnon may have further contributed to Pound’s renewed sense of failure evident in “Cocteau Sociologist” six months later. The apparent dismissal of Greek knowledge in that essay, though, is counterbalanced by Pound’s renewed Greek pursuits on other fronts. His obsessive metrical admonishments to Mary Barnard – “study … the MEDIUM, i;e; [sic] language and everything it consists of consonants, vowels, AND the relative duration of the different sounds, and of their agglomerates,” “really learn to write proper quantitative sapphics in the amurikan langwidge,” “STRICT metrical exercise” – suggest that his interest in Greek melopoeia continues unabated.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While, moreover, Barnard is assigned the research into the “melodic value” of lyric, W. H. D. Rouse is charged with conveying the “sound of men’s voices” in epic.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Two Greek genres thus taken care of, Pound sets on spurring Eliot to work on the drama that might combine them.

On March 28, 1935, Pound sends Eliot “Song fer the Muses’ Garden,” a bawdy poem similar to the “Sage Homme” that commemorated the birth of The Waste Land:

If this too is intended as celebratory it is less clear what collaboration the two poets may be celebrating.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But, taken together with “Cocteau Sociologist” (published that January) and what Pound says there about the use of Greek, it is not farfetched to think that Pound’s intention is to start to prodding Eliot towards acting with respect to Greek again. (In the very same letter Pound expresses disappointment at Rouse not following his advice in his Odyssey translation.) Pound’s somewhat cryptic use of Oedipus as a mythical stand-in makes sense beyond Cocteau’s Infernal Machine, which is doubtless in both poets’ minds.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The willed though perverted appearance of the “sacred grove” in “Nightingales” suggests that Oedipus is part of their conversation about tragedy from the very beginning, and in connection to, or as a continuation of, Aeschylus. Both “Sage Homme” and “Song fer the Muses’ Garden” are mostly about friendship, and “Nightingales” marks the ultimate such act between them, with Pound’s “giving” his word “siftings” to Eliot before he got to use it in Mauberley. If a “boy’s best friend is his Oedipus” perhaps because he helps him dispatch his (poetic) ancestors, the boy himself is also like Theseus, in whose power it is to guide Oedipus towards absolution, towards a sacred space, in which he himself can then glory, leaving nothing for anyone else: “Ez Po and Possum / Have picked all the blossom,” or at least should do so.Footnote ¹¹⁰

All of the factors outlined above inspired Pound not only towards revisiting his Agamemnon opening, but also towards doing his own Sweeney-esque version of Oedipus, an undated, two-page draft of which is found among his papers.Footnote ¹¹¹ The few lines there are point to Oedipus at Colonus rather than Tyrannus; the curious but hesitant chorus who lack full knowledge of the story fit in better with the Athenian chorus of the later play rather than with the Theban chorus of the former, while their reference to the “Edipus complex” marks Pound’s intention to imbue the scene with the perspective of an even later time.Footnote ¹¹² The draft is more of an overture of friendship or invitation to collaboration towards Eliot (whether or not it was sent to him) than a rapprochement with Sophocles. The passage spoken by the chorus on the first page has been marked by Pound in holograph with “agon” and “antagonz,” forging a link to the Aristophanically minded Eliot, and with the suggestion that this is “Oedipus as Brer Devil heard it,” a further connection to Eliot. The Uncle Remus frame itself – though present only in the note and in the transcription of accent – is another attempt to “get a ‘language,’” this time not by attempting a stylistic merging between the two worlds but by a full transplanting, much like the ones Cocteau was gesturing towards, and Eliot had accomplished already in Sweeney Agonistes.

Eliot for his part has finally finished with the Agamemnon in 1935. His first complete – and most formalist – play, centers on an Agamemnonic Murder in the Cathedral,Footnote ¹¹³ uses an Aristophanic structure,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and moves closest to the Senecan ideal he had articulated in the late 1920s. Insofar as this is a historical play, but also because Thomas Becket’s sermon functions both within the play and within the theater, reality and fiction seem to be merged. But we are decisively not allowed to be fully absorbed in the events as they unfold and forget the present moment; the four murderous knights break the fourth wall, putting the question and onus of the archbishop’s murder onto us. With the Agamemnon thus transformed – indeed, literally converted – the silent men in mocha brown in the audience are now expected to enter back in and participate in the chorus’s verbal ritual of communal atonement.

When Pound congratulates Eliot on the play, he echoes the Waste Land letters of late 1921 to early 1922: “Congrats, you damn ole slowcoach,” he offers, and then quickly urges him not “to stay in the maternity ward for six months after the operation.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ He thus rhetorically ties this finally successful Agamemnon play to their earlier Aeschylus-haunted Waste Land collaboration, which allows him to overlook at least temporarily its religious content. His renewed optimism about Greek drama makes itself felt in Guide to Kulchur, where Pound acknowledges his own previous biases against tragedy, now placing the blame for its “lapse” squarely on the translator’s shoulders: “the translation is unreadable,” but “THE Agamemnon” “as an entity … stands rock-like” (92–93). Not yet cured of the Atreidae, Pound seems intrigued by the thought of diving back in. He even returns to the relationship between “living speech” and prosody: “Only true speech will hold the movement…. The moment you ruin the reality of the speech merely to fit a metre, all the precision is lost,” he writes to an unidentified correspondent in April 1938.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Though “some hellenists” abandoned this problem “years ago” by not working hard enough on “quantitative greek meters,” he leaves the door open to a new “metrical renaissane [sic] due to greek.”

In late 1937 to early 1938, Pound and Eliot again exchange letters on drama, prompted by Pound, in which they reaffirm their formalist and elitist principles.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But as soon as Eliot admits to having finished The Family Reunion, Pound remains unconvinced that his friend’s turn to “drammerdy” was not a “calamedy,”Footnote ¹¹⁸ and re-articulates his earlier critique of theater to other correspondents: The dramatic elements distract from the literary intensity.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The only way it might work is if the context is right; now Pound thinks of it less in terms of social adequation as in his writings on Cocteau in the mid-30s, and more as a combination of Eliot’s assessments in “Reflections on Vers Libre” and Storer’s 1917 connection between the possibility of tragedy/poetic drama and the presence of belief. As, for Eliot, Greek drama is primarily useful in thinking about communal religious experience – first focused on ritual in the Harrisonian mode, then more in tune with Christian liturgyFootnote ¹²⁰ – so now Pound writes, “one needs a total social revolution before one can set up real festivals of any kind. Drama religious, but not costume historique. Essence of religion is the present tense” (L 342). It is that sense of the present yet timeless that he had identified in Sarah Bernhardt’s performance and, differently, in Cocteau, still the only dramatist he will praise.

The question of belief is pressing for Pound in 1939; his plan for the last twenty-nine cantos is to “move on to philosophy and outline the kind of religion a healthy man can BELIEVE,”Footnote ¹²¹ and it is with Eliot he wants to discuss it.

Pound’s overture to Eliot – for them to again figure out together “what is to be our philosophy” and renew their earlier Greek work, which had led to Sweeney’s “Agon,” if to nothing else – is sealed by the reference to “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” Eliot’s own early attempt to depict their collaboration. It is odd Pound would be so attached to this dialogue, though some of its motifs are important for Eliot’s treatment of the Oresteia. It is probably the spirit in which it was written that made it most attractive,Footnote ¹²³ and the way in which it led Eeldrop/Eliot not to “spifferate” on his beliefs but to enact them in his Sweeney poems and in his fragmentary comedy. Indeed, Pound himself, in his 1916 review of Joyce’s Exiles, had prophetically called for a “real agonist” who would “write ‘drama’” exhibiting “a mind in search” instead of trying “to preach at you” (L/JJ 55–56). As Eeldrop says in the sentence following that quoted by Pound, “The essential is, that our philosophy should spring from our point of view and not return upon itself to explain our point of view…. We must avoid having a platform” (CP 1, 527–8). In 1920 Eliot would make a similar claim for Aeschylus in propria persona: “The Agamemnon, or Macbeth … are as much works of the ‘intellect’ as the writings of Aristotle”; they do not “embod[y] a philosophy” but are “a precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view, a world” (CP 2, 280, 282). It is perhaps a position to which Pound wants to recall the now-devout and belief-spifferating Eliot; or, depending on how one interprets Pound’s last sentence above, to get Eliot to open up to Pound’s own recently formed beliefs. The stage is thus set for the new, belief-inflected realignment between American poetry and Greek tragedy during and after the Second World War.