This chapter will examine H.D.’s multi-generic translation of Euripides’ Ion (1937), which, with its apparent straightforward Athenian emphasis – “grand-period Greek,” as she calls it in the letter to Pound in my epigraph – would seem to go against H.D.’s general preference for more complex genealogies and temporalities. H.D.’s Ion crystallizes her approach to Greek, redefining the practice of translation in the process; allows her to propose an alternative theory of psychic development contra Freud; and, finally, in its specific (mis)reading of the Euripidean play, foreshadows Pound’s treatment of Sophocles in Women of Trachis by making a strong case for the poetic and cultural relevance, aliveness, and indeed necessity of Greek tragedy in the twentieth century. As with the earlier translations, H.D. turns to Ion during a moment of both personal and global crisis; her writing block in the early 1930s, which caused her to seek psychoanalysis, eventually with Freud himself, was apparently prompted by her sense of impending political turmoil and fear of a second world war. The play provides a way of coping with both these issues and additionally responds to the questions left unresolved at the end of Hippolytus Temporizes, regarding the possibility of accessing “Greece” and of a more positive valuation of destructive or illusory song.

I will trace here the intellectual development in H.D.’s theoretical and practical engagement with “grand-period Greek” over a span of about twenty years. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to her mid-1930s translation of the Ion, but the sections on the Euripidean play are bookended by brief and focused examinations of “Murex,” the second novella in Palimpsest (1926), and her series of wartime long poems collected as Trilogy (1944–46) that show, respectively, the germination and evolution of the questions, ideas, and techniques that went into the making of Ion. “Murex” contemplates explicitly the connection between “antiquity” and “modernity,” redefining both while continuing to tie that connection back to “rhythm” or other specific poetic means just as HT does. Some of the novella’s insights, as well as the specific shell imagery used to develop them, are pivotal for her treatment of Euripides’ Ion in 1935. Similarly, the hard-won optimism in the poems of Trilogy is a large-scale application of the lessons H.D. uncovered in the Ion and relies on images – such as that of the flowering tree – first developed in her version of the play.

Unlike with her other translations from Greek tragedy to this point, H.D. tackles the Ion in its entirety, and does so through a variety of programmatically conceived formal innovations, foremost of which is her decision to interweave a lengthy commentary throughout her translation. I read the Ion’s methodological translation program through the perspective of Walter Benjamin, before turning to an analysis of her particular distillation of the Euripidean play. Why is the Ion the play H.D. turns to at this particular moment? Why would a translation of the Ion be the “solution” to H.D.’s 1930s writing block, and how is it materially and poetically different from her earlier translations, both of select Ion choruses and of IA and Hippolytus? I argue that, psychoanalyzing Euripides, his protagonist Kreousa, and herself all at once, she translates the text of Ion as an allegory for poetic writing; I rely on Maurice Blanchot’s account of inspiration to explain how H.D. uses the play to counter a Freudian theory of art focused on sublimation. In the Ion, moreover, H.D. explicitly situates herself against not only specific contexts of reception but also existing scholarship on Euripides; this paves the way for her deeply read engagement with the Helen myth in Helen in Egypt a little less than twenty years later. Pushing through primary accounts of the play available to her in the 1930s (by Gilbert Murray, A. W. Verrall, Jane Harrison, perhaps even Wilamowitz), H.D.’s remarkable interpretation of Euripides’ poetic strategies aligns with more recent scholarly accounts (e.g., by Victoria Wohl). Deploying differently the elements of commentary and translation in this multi-generic work, H.D. dramatizes both her own desire to believe in a triumphant narrative that would bind ancient and modern culture and would make poetry the cure or compensation for trauma, and the contingency or constructedness of such a position – just as Euripides is now thought to have done himself (see below). Though her Ion as a whole seems like an unperformable text given the ever present commentary, it is dramatic in essence: What is put onstage is that tension between belief and unbelief that is also at the core of this and other Euripidean plays – and which H.D. will probe even more thoroughly in Helen in Egypt.

Antiquities and Modernities in “Murex”

In Tribute to Freud, H.D. often returns to Freud’s insight regarding the homology between the history of the individual and the history of the race: “he had brought the past into the present,” she writes, “with his the childhood of the individual is the childhood of the race – or is it the other way round? – the childhood of the race is the childhood of the individual” (12, italics in original).Footnote ² At the same time, though always acknowledging the limitations of such representation, Freud uses “real” external antiquity to help us understand his mapping of the mind; think, for example, of Rome in Civilization and Its Discontents (16–18). H.D. takes Freud’s insight and reverses the process, and in so doing destabilizes even Freud’s own certain rhetorical possession of “antiquity.” By internalizing or psychologizing the antiquity/modernity distinction, implicitly in Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion but explicitly in Palimpsest’s second novella “Murex: London 1916–1926,” H.D. models for us approaches to the “external,” historical modernity/antiquity. She explores the extent to which any given “now” (“modern” taken etymologically to mean ‘just now’) is directed, jostled, or illuminated by the “then” in a visceral, immediate though not necessarily detectable way, proposing that both are underwritten by an “eternal” truth, which is the very fact of their reciprocal ever changing configuration.

As in “Hipparchia,” H.D. in “Murex” uses the relationship between past and present, “antiquity” and “modernity,” as a governing metaphor: not, this time, for the relation between two people but for that between her protagonist Raymonde and her own past. “The past of somewhere about 1917” is to Raymonde antiquity “further than an Egyptian’s coffin” because of interposed “layer and layer of pain, of odd obliteration” (Palimpsest 108–09). But H.D. also turns what should be a temporal relation into a spatial one, just as in “Hippolytus Temporizes”:

Recalling Freud’s spatial structuring of the mind, H.D. insists on the interpenetration of depth and surface (the unconscious and the conscious perhaps) and on the essential obscurity of both; neither “antiquity” nor “modernity” can be easily or independently or accurately portrayed. When a few pages later H.D. writes of “the static antiquity behind the comparatively modern antiquity of Plato” and aligns both “all Athens in its dying splendour” (during Plato’s lifetime) and the “antiquity of modern times, the antiquity of 1917” with “a shadow seen from a dark cave,” we realize the mobility of both of her terms (169). The “Antiquity behind antiquity [that] had glowed like jacinth” thus becomes more than a particular moment in time and, despite the Platonic overtones, is in the course of the novella identified not with truth but with poetry: a poetry that is not “original,” or even inspired, but “falsified” and always in semi-concealed relation to some other past, and never with fully explainable origins. The poem thus becomes not simply a translation, but a transmission of things its writer may not (want to) know.

Like “Hipparchia,” “Murex” is about a poet who, here less self-consciously, gathers poetic flowers, this time from the nineteenth-century Anglo-American lyric tradition, and whose anthological activity is tightly bound to her own creativity. But Raymonde, insisting that “the past is the past,” has been living in a timeless present – what she calls the “drug and anodyne of London” – and needs a reverse psychopomp to guide her back to living and to writing (101, 118). After the appropriately named Ermy makes her appearance, she “whips” Raymonde into speech, like another “Hermes of the Ways.” The poem she inspires, and whose composition takes up the second half of the novella, relates to the past in several more ways. The line to which this ostensibly new poem owes its being, a line that Raymonde had “always looked for” and finally “now … had,” is a combination of a “plagiarism” from Poe’s “To Helen” (“hyacinth hair”) and a color theme from Browning’s “Popularity” (“Tyrian shells / Enclosed the blue”): “Tyrian blue hyacinths against hyacinth hair” (147). “O plagarissimo [sic],” Raymonde imagines Freddie telling her, this Aldington stand-in fittingly worried about original work (151). A few pages later, Raymonde comments twice that her poem “sounded like a new transcription from Khayyám” (154). Her rebirth as a poet comes, then, first as an echo of two nineteenth-century poets – fittingly, for this American writer in England, a British and an American one – and then as a translation from an original she had only known (and cites) in Edward FitzGerald’s translation. Much like “Hermes of the Ways,” the new poem borrows its images and sounds from elsewhere.

“Murex” also draws a distinction between rhyme and meter. The latter is represented by the steady rhythm of “feet, feet, feet, feet” outside Raymonde’s London window and identified both with the marching soldiers of 1916 and with the working women going on with their lives in 1926 (see, e.g., 98–99, 115). Meter carries on, lulling Raymonde into forgetfulness, but rhyme carries over, as becomes clear when Raymonde is composing her poem: “the rhyme from outside broke across her set determination to be fair to Mavis [her erstwhile romantic rival]…. Something, some other metre, was about to tick, tick like some insistent metronome in the air above her” (148). This second “metre” now dictates the direction of her writing, but is not something we already know how to measure – “not that kind, not your kind,” as she tells Freddie (see my epigraph above). Though in the beginning the poem’s lines are clearly iambic, they are grouped and cut in a different metrical arrangement each time they appear. Later Raymonde identifies it with the “inviolable law” of Apollo:

So, for example, it is inadvertent rhyme that prompts her to identify herself both with the treacherous woman at the heart of her poem and with “the inviolate host / who, sent for Beauty, / died before Troy gate” – both with Helen and her “victims” (150). Though Raymonde speaks of freeing herself “of all my old compunction” and of loving the other woman’s “treachery,” what comes through in her writing is precisely the compunction about writing it and presenting this ruined beauty. The poem shows Raymonde’s fear that she might be again, after the fact, trying, if not to sell war as a quest for beauty, at least to put a beautiful face on war or mark it as a positive moment for her poetic awakening. As in the dialogue between Artemis and Hippolytus in Hippolytus Temporizes, what is spoken in the poem is found to exceed or override what is thought by the poet.

Finally, “Murex” offers a defense of poetry as translation by converting Hipparchia’s “wine-pressing” – her ambivalent metaphor for poetic writing and/as translation – into “distillation,” as exemplified by the processing of murex shells. The key is Browning’s “Popularity,” which gives the story its title and epigraph in addition to registering in Raymonde’s “new” poem. “Popularity” suggests a parallel for the poet’s difficult but unrecognized labor in the fisherman who extracts the precious purple dye from the murex. Everyone who stands around the fisherman knows about the prized substance hidden in these mollusks (“Who has not heard how Tyrian shells / Enclosed the blue”) and is able to cite famous instances of its use (“quote tradition / How depths of blue sublimed some pall”).Footnote ³ When faced with the actual catch, though, the bystanders can only exclaim, “Mere conchs! Not fit for warp or woof!” But, Browning tells us, we should wait,

The poet is presented by analogy as a distiller, as one who sees and discloses hidden potential. Her genius lies in perseverance, in trying every way possible to access and help produce the “liquor” hidden in unbecoming shells. The question in the poem’s penultimate line, “Who fished the murex up?,” that H.D. borrows for her epigraph, refers both to the literal fisherman, who first catches the murex, and to the cunning one’s action of fishing up the murex qua purple dye (the word’s second meaning) from the murex as shellfish. That is, the question is also one of double meanings: Who created this second, “poetic/literary” sense for this word?Footnote ⁴ The poet is cunning enough to discern two (two meanings, two elements, antiquity behind antiquity) where there seems to only be one, “mere conchs” or “the past.” As H.D.’s Ion will show, being the first one to catch the murex (have an idea, write a line) matters less than actually knowing what to do with it: pound, squeeze, clarify, refine.Footnote ⁵

Getting It Across: H.D.’s Ion Commentary

In 1938, a year after the Ion’s publication, Pound wrote that “H.D. in her Ion has tried various wheezes”; even though “[s]he has certainly pared down as much as [Gilbert Murray] has upholstered and straw-filled,” this “opposite system doesn’t work either” (GK 93). Though he doesn’t elaborate on what the “wheezes” are, the translation is remarkable in three ways. First, the emotional intensity of the choral sections has been heightened with a particular goal in mind; second, the dialogue has indeed been pared down; and third, more radically, the translation is accompanied by an extensive running commentary. In Pound’s reading, H.D. resorts to such ruses in order to make the play “live” for a twentieth-century audience, but, unlike Cocteau’s radical condensation of Antigone, to which he compares this Ion, the final result does not justify these departures. Pound, whose own attempts to translate the Agamemnon and the Elektra focus so exclusively on the plays’ linguistic aspects and on their immediacy, on what can be articulated and seen at once and without remainder, might be understandably condescending. In his view, the cuts and expansions, and especially the prose interludes, would be a kind of surrender: The translator does not let the play speak on its own, does not let its language perform and display its modern relevance, but rather wheezes it out herself, her voice drowning out that of the ancient text. What Pound misses is that these features do not simply constitute H.D.’s hopeless additions and subtractions. They are in fact demanded by her reading of the play and integral to her “task of getting it across”;Footnote ⁶ moreover, they form part of an effort, similar to that Pound and Eliot are engaged in around this time, to think about the possibilities of poetic drama, in relation to Greek tragedy on the one hand, and to the larger ethical/religious question of belief.

In a 1936 sketch for a radio piece titled “Translation – For and Against,” one of Walter Benjamin’s imaginary interlocutors suggests that the “successful form of translation” is one “which acknowledges its own role by means of commentary and makes the fact of the different linguistic situation one of its themes” (250). “Because the difference … was acknowledged,” he continues, “the translation could become effective, a component of its own world” (250). While the Benjamin of “The Task of the Translator” (1924) would hope that such a registering of difference could happen in the translation itself, primarily through the pursuit of syntactic literalness (and without supplemental materials), he now seems to be proposing an alternative option, perhaps more wary of the risk of falling into the depths of language as Hölderlin did in his Sophocles (and as Pound would do in his Elektra). Elsewhere, Benjamin would write that commentary and translation are the “same phenomenon considered from different aspects,” adding that they relate to a text as style and mimesis (respectively) relate to nature (“One-Way Street,” 449). In his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Benjamin brings in a third term, now distinguishing between commentary and “Kritik.” The former, he says, is the work of the chemist, the latter of the alchemist. Where commentary, seeking “material content,” patiently analyzes the ashes of the “burning funeral pyre” which is the growing work, critique, seeking “truth content,” inquires into the “living flame,” and presumably transforms it into new material (298). While the commentator aims at a reconstruction of the past on the basis of remaining evidence, the critic’s work forges a relationship between past and present, examining that “living flame” as it “continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced” (298). By separating logs and ashes through weight and tense, Benjamin suggests the critic is interested in approaching that “truth” through and not despite its historical progression. In this definition of Kritik Benjamin is not far from Friedrich Schlegel, who, however, is more dismissive of commentary and more explicit about the futural orientation of the endeavor, arguing in favor of “a criticism that would not be so much the commentary of an already existing, finished, and withered literature, as the organon of a literature still to be achieved … that would not only explain and conserve, but that would be productive itself.”Footnote ⁷

In 1936, at almost the exact time that the speaker in “Translation – For and Against” was lamenting that the “successful form of translation” that is commentary was “on the wane in modern times,” H.D. had just completed her translation-cum-commentary of Euripides’ Ion, a work that can be best understood in these Benjaminian terms. Her translation “proper” (what we would most conventionally term a translation) operates as “critique” in the Benjaminian–German Romantic sense. It is exclusively focused on shaping the Euripidean play – not arbitrarily, but certainly beyond what a professional translator would customarily allow – and revealing its living flame, forging a very particular relation between its time and her own. Her commentary, on the other hand, performs the analytic function as well as the difference-acknowledging function that Benjamin discusses, but it also works on a mimetic level to produce the effect that the original play may have produced on its audience, and thus to resurrect some of the “content” that her translation itself suppresses.

In her “Translator’s Note” H.D. writes that each of the nineteen sections into which she has divided the play “for convenience” is preceded by “explanatory notes” that are “merely the translator’s personal interpretation; the play may be read straight through with no reference, whatever, to them” (149).Footnote ⁸ This would be difficult: The prose interludes are not only found at the heading of sections but also within them – and this is especially true in the opening four – making them hard to skip. Even when they are limited to the beginnings of particular sections, they are sometimes multiple pages in length. Eileen Gregory has identified three commentator voices (an aesthete dilettante, a less self-conscious interpreter, and a heroic apologist) that are in dialogue with “the lyricist” translator, which further suggests that a singular “personal interpretation” is not to be found in the notes.Footnote ⁹ The commentary, I argue, is an essential and inextricable part of this intentionally multi-generic translation.Footnote ¹⁰ H.D.’s slanted approach to Euripides’ Ion, as displayed in the translation “proper,” demands this interjected prose, which not only fulfills the functions of the commentary outlined in “Translation – For and Against,” but supplies elements of the Euripidean text that would otherwise be left out. For example, in the earlier part of the play, just as H.D. is silencing doubts present in Euripides about Apollo’s oracle, her commentary introduces new elements of doubt regarding the possibility of this (or any) interpretation and staging of the play. Or, later on, just as H.D. the translator erases Athena’s litany of Ion’s descendants and Athens’s future glories, the commentary offers a lengthy and fairly stereotypical modern account of fifth-century Athenian “greatness.” But, most importantly, since H.D. repurposes the Euripidean choral songs towards her interpretation of the play, it is the commentary that fulfills the role of the (twentieth-century) chorus.

The commentator comments of course on the function of the chorus. It is,

So this very commentary: It consists in a multiplicity of voices that shade for us the translator’s choices and highlight moods, as though the play itself now needs a new kind of formal chorus to be carried across – a chorus that will help us visualize it, underline its relevance, or read into the characters’ states of mind from yet another perspective. In section x, for example, the commentator prefaces the chorus’s second stasimon by miming (her interpretation of) their words through her own passionate language: “They breathe bitter and fiery words as if to prophesy the unconscious reaction of their queen. They feel as one, as proud, deserted woman might feel” (200). Indeed, such an identification with the female protagonist Kreousa is present elsewhere too. In section xii, the third stasimon, the commentator sets the mood for what the chorus and Kreousa will say: “No such things we can imagine them thinking, ever happen in our holy city…. This sun-god had mixed the vibrations, has committed that most dire of spiritual sins, he has played fast and loose with the dimension of time and space” (222). This is not commentary, strictly speaking, but a kind of prophecy, a pre-emptive strike as the commentator herself plays “fast and loose with the dimension of time and space”; while Apollo does so by raping and abandoning Kreousa, H.D., we might say, does it by taking hold of this text, of these women, and putting herself in their place.

The chorus are also the play’s timekeepers. H.D. assigns to them – presumably inspired by A. W. Verrall – the function of the modern “curtain”; she sees them, that is, as a means of changing scenes and indicating the passage of time between them.Footnote ¹¹ But, contra Verrall, who reads the chorus as a necessary inconvenience that helps overcome one obstacle (the absence of a curtain) but creates many others, she views the “unity of time” that, according to Verrall, the use of the chorus necessitates not as constricting but as freeing and “modern.”Footnote ¹² In the heading to section vi the commentator tells us that “Greek unity gives us freedom, it expands and contracts at will, it is time-in-time and time-out-of-time together, it predicts modern time-estimates” (185). What it does, then, is allow a depth of time in addition to the measured-out length of time (antiquity behind antiquity); it introduces a fissure in the present moment, discord in the play’s linear accord, and thus establishes a kind of indeterminate rhythm. H.D.’s own contraction and expansion of Euripides would, then, seem to be dictated by the play itself, which lingers on the description of paintings or of a dance, while quickly dispensing with the problematic nature of a false oracle. As H.D. elaborates, “the choros is the march-past of hours, their time-values are ultra-modern, accordion-pleated, as it were. They may minimize the passage of time, or in a few stark words, they may convey an impression of hours lapsed” (222).Footnote ¹³ Similarly, the commentary, for example in section iii (the parodos), moves from the fifth century and a reading of the Euripidean chorus marveling at Apollo’s temple to the present within four lines. The multiple voices of the commentary, which are not so clearly distinguished in character and which, therefore (contrary to Gregory’s suggestion of a progression), do overlap in the unfolding of the text, weave the palimpsest of the Ion’s times, exposing and concealing threads of response and relation both to such “foundational” texts and to the notion of foundation. By aligning her commentary with the chorus, H.D. suggests that the “outsiders” are already inside the play, and that the play does not exist unless it is being shaped by such voices, by such “wheezing.” Such a use of the commentary complements the critique at work in the translation “proper.”

H.D., finally, substitutes her era’s common literary language and “cultural patrimony” for that which the Athenian chorus presumably shared with its audience. The commentary, that is, functions also as the repository of an impressionistic history of classical reception, including the modernist, Aldingtonian swipe against “scholarship” (which, if followed through, would of course preclude the presence of a lengthy commentary interrupting a work of literature). H.D. initially seems to make the familiar distinction between “philology” and a broader, more embodied, material-oriented understanding of the text, setting up an opposition between “the boy, Ion” and his “delicate phrases”:

Even this very passage concludes differently than we might have expected. Learning Greek with your lungs suggests sounding it out, breathing out its voice and its meters (“feet”), and not leaving the language qua language behind. The commentary rehearses more of her era’s prominent approaches (classic, romantic, decadent, archaizing, ritualistic) to tragedy and to “Greece”: “gesture may be simple, direct copy of marble arm and bared limb of pentellic [sic] frieze, or it may tune-in to a less formal era, romantic beat and barbaric rhythm that have become familiar through the exotic present-day ballet”; posture may be “hieratic” and utterance “frigid”; “he has the whole run and rhythm of near-eastern colour and exoticism to draw on,” and so on (159). We further have a reference to potential interpretations of Kreousa as “‘savage’” and “frenzied” (214) in a nod to early twentieth-century primitivism, and a comparison between tragedy and opera or religious liturgy (150–51). “Passionate lovers of the drama” are addressed as much as “budding Philhellene[s]” who have nonetheless “let the whole thing go” – a nod to Pound perhaps (153). But broaching all of these often diametrically opposed approaches leaves us with more questions than answers. The following comment on translating the Greek stichomythia is a case in point:

Is there any approach to these works that hasn’t been attempted? Perhaps exactly this one. The detailed acknowledgment of this burden, together with the interpretive risk that the poet-translator takes in her rendering of the text proper, is what constitutes for H.D. a full translation of Greek tragedy in the first half of the twentieth century. The localized, time-specific dialogue or negotiation presumably taking place between the performance on the Athenian stage and the Athenian citizens in the audience is replaced by a dialogue between a polemically reconstructed text – which aims at unearthing the antiquity behind the antiquity of Euripides, and H.D.’s time too – and the multiple traditions of its reception.Footnote ¹⁴

On Oracles and Ironies: H.D.’s Reorientation of the Ion’s Origin Plot

Throughout her Ion commentary H.D. both uses, seemingly straightforwardly, the modernity versus antiquity distinction – to call various aspects of Euripides’ play “ultra-modern,” for example – and seems very eager to collapse it. Early on she returns to the two modern antiquities of “Murex”:

To a linear notion of time H.D. juxtaposes a palimpsestic one, one of simultaneity, as if she and Euripides were together contemplating the same question, that of art’s relationship to time as such. Contra Woolf, she writes, “How can we believe that 500 b.c. and a.d. 500 (or our own problematical present) are separated by an insurmountable chasm? The schism of before and after Christ, vanishes” (203). Her Ion and Euripides’ Ion arise out of a pause, a caesura in fifth-century, twentieth-century world progress, a caesura necessitated, or accelerated perhaps, by each era’s recent wars.

Many critics have written of H.D.’s 1930s writing block, prompted by her fear of another war, which she sought to overcome through psychoanalysis, at first in London and later, over the course of two years, in Vienna with Freud himself.Footnote ¹⁵ Her letters with Freud frequently refer to it, while in her published diary of her sessions she records dreaming of completed books she had not yet written.Footnote ¹⁶ We have seen that it is through her engagement with Greek tragedy in particular that her anxiety about the link between poetry and war, song and violence is negotiated. It is no surprise, then, that the book hatched from those psychoanalytic sessions is her translation of Euripides’ Ion. As her Hippolytus began where her Iphigeneia ended, so this Ion begins where Hippolytus Temporizes left off: In this play even Apollo, the god of song, the god most friendly to humans, has violated one, Ion’s mother, Kreousa. The play explores the other side of Artemis’s abandonment: Now humanity is contemplating abandoning the gods, and especially this god. DuPlessis and Friedman have argued that “H.D. achieves the fruition of her poet-priestess identity in Trilogy”;Footnote ¹⁷ as I will show, she already does so in Ion. It is the Ion, begun in 1918 and finally completed in 1935 (though published in 1937), that breaks the block and sets the foundation for her later writing, as the Greek Anthology translations had before the First World War, and as Hippolytus had right after.Footnote ¹⁸

Like his Alcestis and Helen, Euripides’ Ion is a tragedy with an ostensibly happy ending, very much unlike the tragedies that H.D. had previously worked on (IA, Hippolytus, Hecuba, and Bacchae). It dramatizes the reunion of Ion, a young priest at Delphi who was mysteriously brought there as an infant, with his mother Kreousa, the autochthonous queen of Athens who many years before had been raped by Apollo and, having been abandoned by him, decided to expose their child. Unable now to conceive and anxious about the future of her Athenian lineage, Kreousa goes to Delphi with her husband, the non-Athenian Xouthos, to seek the advice of the oracle – and this is where the play begins. After a series of misunderstandings that cause Kreousa and Ion to plot each other’s murders, the play concludes with an extended recognition scene. Though glad to have found his mother, Ion remains skeptical of Kreousa’s account of her rape – he is Apollo’s priest, after all – until he is convinced of his divine origins by the dea ex machina Athena, who then provides a long prophecy of Athens’s future glories (past glories for Euripides and his audience, of course) and leads them back to Athens. Unlike Hippolytus, which is in many ways a “modern” play – about repressed emotions and illicit desires – and like IA, the Ion is a foundational tragedy: not for the mythical history of the Trojan War (and thus the epic), but for Athenian culture and, by extension, Greek culture, both insofar as the latter is most frequently associated with Athens, and since Ion, as the play itself tells us, would be the founder of the Ionian civilization. As Wohl puts it, the stakes are particularly high in Ion because “its telos is the arkhē of Athens’s arkhē, the origin of its imperial power.”Footnote ¹⁹

The story and genealogy that Euripides presents in his play, however, wholly bears his stamp and is not found anywhere else.Footnote ²⁰ Jane Harrison refers to the play’s myth as a “transparent piece of political genealogy-making,” aimed at legitimizing Ion as one of Athens’s founding figures, “no matter by what disreputable fraud.”Footnote ²¹ Tying him through Kreousa to the legendary founders Erektheus and Kekrops allows Euripides to authenticate Athens’s claims to autochthony and highlight its influence and significance for the rest of the Hellenic world. He thus flatters its citizens’ pride, and at the same time, especially through Athena’s final speech on Athenian triumphs, boosts the city’s morale in the midst of the Peloponnesian War. Embedded in this triumphant story, however, is a critique that, depending on how far we see it as extending, may undermine what seems to be the play’s most explicit goal. It lies in the very obviousness or “transparency” of Euripides’ motive and the “fraud” that brings it about, the play’s many inconsistencies and contradictions. The most conspicuous is that the oracle leads Xouthos to believe that Ion is his son when, according to the play, he is not – so claims Kreousa, and Athena confirms it. That this means that the oracle has lied is then not given much consideration. For A. W. Verrall, the influential scholar who edited the play in 1890, this is precisely the thrust of Euripides’ critique. He argues that we have to set aside Hermes’ prologue and Athena’s concluding speech where the poet makes the most concessions to faith in miracles and gods; this faith, Verrall maintains, is blatantly contradicted by the actual plot that turns against such beliefs. Victoria Wohl has recently attempted to reconcile these diametrically opposed responses. Calling the Ion an “ideological romance,” she argues that “the play’s means destabilize its end.”Footnote ²² But because every plot turn is marked by accident rather than plan and because the play’s unfolding seems so uncertain, we become more invested in its telos: “It makes the audience long for their own national and imperial destiny even as they are shown its essential contingency. What ultimately secures this precarious destiny is their own spectatorial desire.”Footnote ²³ “The play’s formal structure” thus “leads the audience toward a psychic attachment that withstands any critique, even those the play itself poses.”Footnote ²⁴

H.D. explicitly situates her translation in the context of readings such as the first two, but the interpretation that emerges from the entirety of her Ion is remarkably similar to Wohl’s. H.D. wishes to see in Ion’s story of a foundation for Athens a (new) foundation for the modern world, and consistently tilts the play to that effect. But her commentary, as I suggested above, performs that exact same function of the original Ion’s many contingencies. She flaunts her own desire for belief but consistently undercuts it – and that dynamic seems to be at the very core of Euripides’ play. H.D.’s epigraph from Gilbert Murray’s Euripides and His Age – a book she read closely at the time of Ion’s translation – emphasizes, though in a roundabout way, this tension. Murray connects Euripides to G. B. Shaw’s assessment of Ibsen’s unique contribution to modern theater: “‘Ibsen was grim enough …; no man has said more terrible things; and yet there is not one of Ibsen’s characters who is not … the temple of the Holy Ghost, and who does not move you at moments by the sense of that mystery’” (145). That this can be said also of Euripides “is clear enough,” per Murray. It is easy to see why H.D. chose this quotation: the old–new element, the “garland” in Murray’s forging this series of literary bonds, the location of inspiration or originality always elsewhere (she quotes Murray, who quotes Shaw on Ibsen to make an assessment of Euripides), which will play into her reading of Apollo as the “Voice” in Ion. But she also uses Murray’s insight here to counter Murray’s own argument elsewhere in his book, and to implicitly buttress her own decision to portray not just her characters but Euripides himself as possessed by some kind of “Holy Ghost.”

In her commentary to the play’s second section H.D. goes against an unnamed critic – in fact Murray (the line quoted below is underlined in her copy of his book):

For H.D.’s contemporaries, Euripides’ early twentieth-century readers, the divine names and the use of myth are just masks, meant to expose the deceit of oracles, to inspire patriotism, or to present human psychology; what allows us as modern readers to move from the surface of the play to the underlying “intention” is Euripides’ well-known skepticism, or irony. We hold on to some of his inconsistencies, or point to his very human portrayals of great heroic characters, and thus seeing the human behind the legendary hero, we may conclude, like Wilamowitz, that the myth is just a myth, just a convention that Euripides had to use.Footnote ²⁵ H.D. wants to reverse this movement and take Euripides literally, believe that he means what he writes even if he presents it skeptically. Granting that he does so – that there is an underlying layer of skepticism behind the surface lyricism and the surface plot – she maintains that the lyricism, the surface, is what is yet hidden even deeper, underneath that underlayer of skepticism. She thus complicates an easy manifest–latent content dichotomy; the manifest in this case is the latent, but not the latent her contemporaries detect. If Euripides presents a facade of antiquity through which his modernity shines through, H.D. would, in a sense, want to get at the antiquity behind antiquity that shapes both, but, as the palimpsestic “Hippolytus Temporizes” or “Murex” tell us, not in ways we can clearly and decisively discern and sort out.

H.D.’s resistance to Verrall and Murray’s reading is also one to Freud. As DuPlessis and Friedman argue, “H.D. was disturbed that … [Freud’s] rationalist perspective blinded him to the spiritual realities she found embedded in dreams, religious vision, occult traditions, and art” and wanted him to acknowledge the “religious” task of the poet to understand these spiritual realities instead of seeing her adherence to them as a symptom.Footnote ²⁶ While H.D. “found in Freud’s science of the psyche a way to fuse religion, art, and medicine, he tried to separate the artist from the mystic” by insisting that she is only a poet.Footnote ²⁷ Her attempt, then, to bring poetry and mysticism together in the Ion, nudging art away from artifice and away from Freud’s conception of sublimation, is also the continuation of her dialogue with “the Professor” – to whom she sent the translation upon its completion and who, as we will see, seems to have misunderstood it.

As Euripides invents a new legacy for his Ion and for Athens, so does H.D.Footnote ²⁸ This play, too, reverses the terms of its Greek original, not to cover it up or to obscure it but to make it more visible. This is nowhere more clear than in H.D.’s treatment of Ion’s name. In her prefatory translator’s note H.D. has explained its importance:

What H.D. neglects to tells us here – and refuses to translate later – is that the play itself gives another etymology for the name: “one who comes/goes,” ἰών (iōn) as the masculine active present participle of the verb εἶμι (eimi) ‘come/go’. This act of naming is at the heart of the play’s deception.Footnote ²⁹ The oracle tells Xouthos that the first person he sees going by when he exits the temple will be his son; Xouthos sees Ion. At the end of their ensuing (false) recognition scene, the father exhorts the son to come with him to Athens in secret and names him “Ion” in honor of the oracle (lines 661–63). H.D. omits this entirely. Doubtless it would be difficult to translate this instance of linguistic play, but she could have mentioned it in the commentary or indeed in her translator’s note. That she does not suggests, on the one hand, her resistance to the custom of paternal naming repeatedly portrayed in the play: We are reminded time and again that Ion has been nameless because he has no father, and even at the end Kreousa tells him that Apollo gave him to Xouthos because as son of the god he would still be nameless (lines 1541–43). On the other hand, it reveals her desire to preserve not only the legitimacy of Ion and the Ionic tradition as divinely originated, but of the oracle itself, which is what Euripides questions by subversively suggesting that Ion and the Ionic are based on the god’s ambiguous at best, false at worst oracle.

Gregory calls H.D.’s definitions “imagined” – and certainly they are if we go by the play’s own statements or by a straightforward look in the dictionary.Footnote ³⁰ Yet if we think as the play does – where in the name Ion (Ἴων) it detects a particular verb form – and examine the lexicon with an eye towards wordplay, the other senses given by H.D. do reveal themselves. The form ἴων is the genitive plural of the neuter noun ἴον ‘violet’ (for this meaning, moreover, LSJ notes that it can synechdochically mean any flower), while ἰόν is an unusual form of εἷς [heis] ‘one.’Footnote ³¹ Like Euripides and like the poet in Browning’s “Popularity,” H.D. sees two meanings where others see one, but she replaces Euripides’ pun with her own. Transforming Ion into a flower leaves no question about the stakes of the translation: the emergence and survival (or not) of a poet, and of poetry, conceived by H.D. already in the 1910s anthologically, as a series of personal, if formal, relations between remembering poets identified with flowers – exactly the poetic hosting depicting in “Murex.” Through her chosen etymology H.D. tells a different story of origins, turning Ion into the play “of violets” and placing Ion at the origin of anthologies as the single violet out of which all other flowers sprung, the symbol or metaphorical origin of Greek literature. By getting to the origin of Greece, to the single flower found there – and found not easily or simply – she reaches her own origins as poet and anthologist, and can thus begin resolving her writing block. (It also allows her to forge a personal intertextual connection to HT by reopening the question of Hyacinth, reduced there to the “nullity of flowers.”) This strategy follows Freudian principles, perhaps, but H.D. applies them in reverse. Where Freud tied her obsession with Greece (Hellas) to her mother’s name (Helen),Footnote ³² H.D. asserts that her return to writing must involve a different kind of process: not the sublimation of the personal into the poetic, but the exploration of poetic mythology as personal mythology, both for herself and for Euripides.

Just as H.D. resists limiting herself to the primary and explicit definition of the word ion, so in the play she looks for other available interpretive paths. The Ion is especially rich in ekphrasis and in accounts of ritual practice – as would befit a play set in Delphi, a site shared by Apollo and Dionysus – turning both visual art and performance into words.Footnote ³³ The parodos describes the artwork at Delphi; a messenger offers an elaborate account of “world-making” tapestries in Ion’s tent during his celebratory mountain banquet with Xouthos (with metatheatrical implications);Footnote ³⁴ mentions of weaving abound; and two of the stasima focus on processions (one Bacchic on Parnassus, the other Eleusinian in Athens). In H.D.’s retelling, the Ion is not a story about Athens, nor is it a story about a woman’s traumatic experience of rape. It is a play about poetic voice: a woman’s recovery of poetic inspiration and expression through the reunion with an older “product” that she had thought lost. In Kreousa she encodes her own reunion with the Ion choruses she had worked on in 1918–19, and her return to serious Greek work several years after HT. At the same time, her version of the play makes the case that Euripides himself surreptitiously returns to the “mystery” and to a more naïve/less skeptical belief in the powers of Apollo despite his extensive ironizing of religious ritual and belief.

H.D. thus “hatches” Euripides’ text according to a key she finds in the Euripidean choral sections in order to show that, in an age of brutal wars, intellectualism, and mistrust of spiritualism and art, art was not only possible but in fact the very motor of the intellectualism and guarantor of the survival of war traumas. In addition to such a historical argument that could also be applied to her own time, she dramatizes in Kreousa’s plot the process through which this might happen, proposing this reconfigured tragedy as a psychic and poetic origin story that counters the Freudian Oedipal narrative. It is the semi-articulated originary myth of inspiration, more than the relatively vague historical connections she draws, that allows H.D. to make the Ion temporally relevant and to bring the two times together. By erasing Euripides’ “modern” skepticism, she suppresses her own, and turns the play into the germ of her wartime Trilogy. She presents the same “complex” – the same intertwining of eros, violence, and poetry we have seen in her previous translations – but she is determined, as she will be in Trilogy, to have it work out positively, to find a seed of hope. She uses Euripides’ origin play to rewrite, not to recapitulate, the origins of Western culture and re-root them in poetry and mysticism rather than rationalism.

“What the torch-flame saw”: Realizing the Ion’s Choruses

H.D. explicitly frames the stakes this way early on. Presenting a question presumably in the Athenian theatergoers’ mind, and quite possibly in that of her readers as well, she writes:

Though this is not Euripides’ last play, it may as well be; it is indicative, H.D. implies, of the decline of Athenian tragedy precisely because it challenges that very luminous figure. The answer, as far as Euripides’ twentieth-century critics were concerned, is simple: Superimposed on the melodramatic plot is the story of Athens’s past greatness, which it legitimates and in which it inspires faith. At the same time, the plot itself (the god’s callous behavior, the lies of the oracle, Athena’s less than graceful appearance, the various inconsistencies) offers by virtue of its “badness” advice for moving forward: no more blind faith in gods and oracles. H.D. herself does not give an answer. Instead, as she had suggested in her early comments on tragedy, it is the meters, or rhythms, that, regardless of plot or words, capture the audience: “before the thought actually has time to crystallize,” she continues, “the silver rhythms of this subtle defendant, God’s messenger, silence us” (154). Once again, Hermes (Ermy) seduces unwilling participants into poetry.

What follows is the passage with which H.D. as translator has taken the most liberties in this prologue and probably in the whole play: three eleven-line stanzas with a refrain opening – “Not meaningless, as you might think, / are the god’s plans” – that is more or less invented and whose repetition brings to mind the “Hippolytus Temporizes” poem (154–55). The commentary cited above actually breaks up the single statement in Euripides that the refrain couplet seems to translate: “Loxias is directing events to this conclusion, and contrary to appearances he has not forgotten.”Footnote ³⁵ That is, H.D. ends the second translated section of the prologue with “Loxias arranges this,” inserts her questioning commentary, and continues with the couplet, which then leads into what looks like an independent poem. H.D. herself thus becomes the “subtle defendant” and messenger of the play she is translating; she puts her best self forward, rhyming and half-rhyming to preserve an echo of the rhythm that, she claims, justifies the existence of all the plays and, we will soon realize, of this play in particular. In the absence of obvious or transparent “god’s plans,” it is poetry that acts as a guarantee. H.D. performs this: Apollo’s “arrangement” – a musical word not chosen by accident – may always be interrupted, erased even (in this case by a questioning prose that seems unable or unwilling to understand it), but will persevere.

Another way to gauge H.D.’s intentions for the translation itself is to compare her final version to the few sections that she had translated around 1920 and embedded in an essay she did not publish.Footnote ³⁶ In 1935 she translates with an eye to revealing what she believes is hidden under Euripidean irony or rationalism, and replaces description by urgent invocation. But in the late 1910s she primarily admires the poet’s phanopoetic powers. In Ion’s opening monologue, she claims in the earlier essay,

Echoing Eliot and Woolf, she argues that “there is no adequate translation for the Greek words and there never will be,” and calls her version “the mere skeleton” (265). This is only another performance of demurral, her “skeleton” as close to an X-ray of the Euripidean lines as her “Fragment 113” is to Sappho 146. Compared to the later version, the earlier one is more literal and thus reads more experimental syntactically. H.D. includes, for example, the Greek-derived compound adjectives that we have seen in her IA and Hippolytus choruses – a feature absent in the 1937 text.Footnote ³⁷ The opening of Ion’s monologue ca. 1920:

And the same opening fifteen years later:

The change of priorities between the two versions is clear. In 1937 H.D. understands this speech as Ion’s acclamation of the god rather than as vivid description, and she consequently begins her first three stanzas with “O, my Lord,” with Ion greeting Apollo in praise. The poet’s phanopoetic powers seem to have increased since H.D.’s 1920 reading: Ion’s words made only a beautiful landscape materialize on the stage then, but now they produce the god himself. Rather than effect the overcoming of the mysterious, which is what this play has been thought to depict and what according to Nietzsche Euripides accomplished once and for all,Footnote ³⁸ H.D. reverses the movement and reveals what the play tries to suppress. She rewrites it as a whole so that what Euripides literally, if intentionally unconvincingly, proclaims at its beginning and end (that all was part of a divine plan) becomes convincing.

H.D.’s numerous slight changes that tilt the play towards her reading occur in two directions. First, primarily in the choral sections the praise of the gods as well as the description of mysteries is expanded and emphasized, becoming more effusive and more lyrical, while Christian overtones are added to convey a syncretic sense of timelessness – a Murray touch.Footnote ³⁹ I will expand on this intensification below. Second, everywhere in the play the doubting of gods becomes less harsh (especially in the case of Ion), or more personal and thus less absolute (in the case of Kreousa). So, for example, when Ion first hears of Kreousa’s rape, he emphatically rejects the possibility of divine betrayal: “no, / no, / no, / you are our Lord, / our virtue” (186). While H.D. makes Ion sound like he is in denial, in Greek he simply wants to know what the matter is (ti paschei?, line 437), not that Apollo is blameless. Euripides’ Ion then urges Apollo not to do such things but to pursue aretē ‘virtue’ and takes it upon himself to chastise all the gods for their failings. H.D. skips these eight lines entirely.Footnote ⁴⁰ More crucially, at play’s end, H.D. condenses Athena’s description of Apollo’s largely failed machinations. Rather than show his inability to get what he wants even though he is a god, H.D.’s Athena presents human will interfering with Apollo’s plans in a positive way: “fearing” that Kreousa and Ion might kill each other, “he sent me” (258). The last phrase in Greek is mēchanais errysato (line 1565), “he saved by artifice” (trans. Verrall). This artifice that is so important to Verrall’s understanding of the play H.D. completely suppresses, refusing to identify either god with the artificial or with mean plotting. Ion’s three-line response to Athena when she confirms Kreousa’s account of his identity is translated into ten lines, with H.D. overstating the goddess’s effect and erasing the seed of doubt haunting the Euripidean text:

In Euripides Ion does not jump from impossibility to truth but is rather quite reserved: “We will not receive your words in unbelief. / I am persuaded that I am of Loxias and of her. / Even before this was not incredible” (my translation). The first and last lines in this passage end symmetrically in ouk apistiai and ouk apiston (lines 1606, 1608), suggesting that Athena’s ex machina appearance has not changed very much. Euripides’ Ion expresses a more roundabout denial of rejection instead of H.D.’s glorious affirmation.

But H.D. makes her Euripides-as-mystic argument most explicitly in the play’s choral sections. It is there that her crucial – and intentional – misreadings occur, since it is there that, in her view, Euripides gets carried away, there where she is most able to read between, or under, his lines. The parodos, especially in H.D.’s version, establishes both motifs: Delphi as a place of art and Euripides as a psychoanalytic subject. When the chorus marvel at carvings decorating the temple, H.D. insists that it is Euripides himself speaking in this song, describing the artwork from first-hand experience and recollecting the strong impressions it had left on his youthful painterly eye.Footnote ⁴¹ In the same commentary section where she disputes Murray’s “rationalist” reading, she asks of the tragedian, whom she imagines exiled in Macedonia: “As a student, a thinker, a philosopher, an Athenian, a Greek …, does this ‘old man’ throw his psyche back into the first lyrical intensities of youth?” (156). She thus conjures Euripides as a remembering poet too, who puts in words glorious art he once saw and, fearing perhaps for its disappearance which he himself may have helped bring about, wants to preserve it through his chorus.

The second and third stasima consist of angry laments followed by descriptions of processions. In both instances H.D. translates with an eye not to the blame assigned to the gods in the laments but to the praise implied (though not stated) in the processions. In the first case, H.D.’s section x, the chorus bemoan the Xouthos–Ion alliance, debating whether to disclose it to Kreousa, and then describe in the epode the father and son’s ascent of Parnassus, where a feast will be held in honor of their reunion. The epode’s “few words,” H.D. writes in the commentary preceding the translation, “inflame our imagination,” and she proceeds to tell us exactly how. She describes what “we see” though none of it is said in the actual epode: “a mighty procession, sacrificers, other priestly attendants, a whole company of servants, carpenters, musicians, wine-servants … the sacrificial rams or bulls, strung, unquestionably, with coloured wool fillets and decorative garlands” (200). Though she stays relatively close to the Euripidean text in her translation, H.D. replaces address with presence, general description with actual event. Where Euripides’ women invoke Parnassus and in the process also describe the mountain and the mysteries that take place there, H.D. “realizes” the description by emphasizing Xouthos’s and Ion’s path through the crags, which in Greek is only a single line at the end of the preceding antistrophe. If we see them, moreover, then we also must see Bakkhos [sic] and the Bacchantes too:

After a strophic pair that conveys metrically and syntactically the chorus’s agitated state,Footnote ⁴³ in H.D.’s translation given through short single-stress lines, this epode exhibits evidence of the metrical palimpsest, with fairly regular stress alternation on the level of the line, and foot/meter alternation on the level of the stanza: We go, for example, from three anapests (in three-word, one-stress lines) to an iambic trimeter line, then back to an anapestic line, then to a longer line combining anapest and iamb, and so on. Note also the frequent assonances and rhymes. It is again “the silver rhythms” that “silence us,” convincing us not to doubt what the words tell us.

H.D.’s epode prepares us for her translation of the third stasimon in section xii, which she changes more significantly. Here the chorus have just heard about Kreousa’s rape by Apollo, her subsequent exposure of her child, her fears about Ion – still unrecognized – usurping her throne as Xouthos’s son, and her plot to murder him. They repeat some of this before describing in the second strophe the procession of the Eleusinian mysteries that Ion may witness if he goes to Athens. H.D. does not translate the second antistrophe. Thus, the second strophe (responsion-less in H.D.), which is only slightly longer than the first strophe, recalls the earlier epode formally as well as in terms of content: Where Ion’s and Xouthos’s procession to Parnassus was described there, here we have an imaginary religious procession that Ion may see in Athens though he is not supposed to. As with her textual arrangements in the “Choruses” from IA and Hippolytus, this constructed choral song matches the previous one, giving a sense of symmetry and coherence to H.D.’s text.

There is also a progression in H.D.’s interpretation of the stasima, which aligns with her psychoanalytic reading of Euripides. While before we had to imagine the details of the procession, here, says H.D. (though without explicitly drawing the connection),

For H.D. Euripides’ description of the Eleusinian procession is evidence of Apollo’s spell on the tragedian despite the latter’s intention of criticizing the oracle; Verrall, in contrast, calls this passage “a delicate satire on the prejudices of … local religion.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Skipping the antistrophe contributes significantly to the particular picture H.D. wants to paint. In the Greek, the chorus demand that new songs be written in which men are faulted for their unfaithfulness and unjustness as a counterpart to all the songs that turn against women for these qualities. Wilamowitz notes the irony of this being sung while Kreousa is plotting murder; despite its tenor, then, the song ends up critical of women after all. Rather than being yet another song about them, moreover, it performs the female two-facedness whose constant presence in songs it seems to decry. H.D. refuses to fall into this trap, and ends her section with the seduction not of the female chorus but of the male tragedian. It is he and not his chorus, she suggests, who says the opposite of what he intends to say.

In Euripides the stasimon’s second strophe is about Dionysus though he is not explicitly named. But H.D. leaves out local religious customs and introduces what she sees as the play’s central opposition: namely, that between what is sung of the god and “deeds in the night.” She distorts the first part of her translation to suggest that the chorus are still accusing Apollo of acting against Kreousa:

The question here thus centers on whether Ion’s (our, H.D.’s) adoration of gods, his focus on “the sacred spring,” blinds him from seeing the harm. But the chorus’s accusations of the god (whether explicit as H.D. makes them or implicit as explained by Verrall) are nonetheless belied by the enthralled depiction of a dancing ritual that follows – a ritual that Ion, or the rationalist poet, ought not observe:

The monotonous accusations above give way to a kind of rhythm. Now the lines alternate between an alliterating trochaic meter and the line-final spondees associated with nature in the Hippolytus choruses – in the last two lines in a configuration called, fittingly, ionic (two unstressed/short syllables followed by two stressed/long ones). H.D. thus exposes a progression in the play’s choral songs that runs counter to the idea of “Euripides the rationalist”: from the recollection of youthful admiration of Delphic art to the (silent) injunction to imagine the Delphic mysteries on Parnassus, which H.D. realizes, to the actual enthralled description of such mysteries, albeit under the form of a proscription.Footnote ⁴⁷

On Inspiration: Kreousa between Helios and AtheneFootnote ⁴⁸

In L’Espace littéraire Maurice Blanchot reads inspiration as the fusion of inspiration proper and its lack, calling it “force créatrice et aridité intimement confondues” (233). More specifically, he claims that inspiration can be powerful only when the person receiving it has become weak or empty, and no longer relies on the world, its resources, or herself – no longer seems to rest on the first kind of rhythm, with its alternation of day and night, life and death (240). He identifies the leap as the form or movement of inspiration, elucidating it through the Orpheus myth, and tying it to desire: “Regarder Eurydice, sans souci du chant, dans l’impatience et l’imprudence du désir qui oublie la loi, c’est cela même, l’inspiration” (228). Though Orpheus knows that to complete his song Eurydice has to be kept at a distance, that, as Anne Carson might say, erotic writing depends on maintaining the gap, he gazes back and seeks to obliterate it, thus losing Eurydice, himself, and the song. That loss of self and world, that jump taken without certainty of success, that plunge towards what is unknown (and unknowable) but desired is the risk to which one needs to submit. That is, Orpheus’s “impatience” is not an accident or a fault, Blanchot claims, but necessary for the production of the work, whose completion is still not assured. It is this risk that H.D.’s Kreousa submits to at the climax of her Ion: the risk of a de-personalizing inspiration that would again, for a moment, thrust her outside her world and her rhythm, making another rhythm felt over which she has no power – the risk of an inspiration, of which, as Blanchot writes, there can be no presentiment except for that of failure and no experience except that of violence. Poetry would thus not arise through Freudian sublimation but from its opposite: the desire to face one’s desires head-on.

H.D.’s Ion, like her Hippolytus Temporizes and even her IA, is less about the family romance, or about the real physical violence perpetrated on Kreousa by the god, and more about art and the poet’s vocation; Kreousa’s relation with Apollo is presented largely in musical/artistic terms. In H.D.’s previous Euripidean works song was similarly tied to violence, while in the Palimpsest narratives poetic inspiration is portrayed as violation by a male alter ego. Raymonde puts on Ray Bart’s “heavy” “helmet” in “Murex” and defines “inspiration” as “the canker, the pain, the fester that … bit and scalded into [her] forehead”; Hipparchia’s dead and internalized brother Philip remains “her passion, her intellect … her inspiration,” without whom she would not have known “this intellectual ecstacy [sic] when body and brain are merged like a sword and its very victim” (Palimpsest 148, 150, 73, 74). In her Ion H.D. fully enacts and resolves this conflict through Kreousa’s character. While H.D.’s Euripidean chorus displays the fascination with mystical rhythm that readings of the play have tended to suppress (following Euripides’ own “negation”), her treatment of Kreousa functions as its counterbalance, presenting the questioning but also the eventual justification of such enchantment.

In her earlier essay on Ion H.D. had claimed that “the whole character of the play alters after [Kreousa’s] coming” because she challenges – “shadows,” as H.D. put it – “our” and Ion’s faith in Apollo (276). H.D.’s version of the play charts, especially through the commentary, Kreousa’s progression from repressed woman to powerful goddess, from one kind of “abstraction” to another through a passage into “humanity.” H.D.’s Kreousa first appears as inorganic matter – while the chorus have “humanity,” she has “the inhumanity of a meteor, sunk under the sea” – that then crystallizes into a statue: Her robes “seem to fall in folds that are cut of pure stone, lapis. She has always been standing there. She seems, simply, a temple property that we have, so far, neglected” (171). Ion looks at her accordingly. Admiring her “rare beauty” and “grace,” he asks “O, goddess, / what rain / mars that marble, / your face?” (171). This is notable especially in comparison to the Greek and to H.D.’s original translation of the passage. In both, the emphasis is not on Kreousa’s aesthetic appeal but on her genos. Ion marvels at her γενναιότης (gennaiotēs, line 237) and her being εὐγενής (eugenēs, lines 240, 243), her noble bearing and gentle breeding; “O noble of birth … you were sprung of a great people,” H.D.’s earlier Ion had exclaimed (275). But here Kreousa is folded into a Hulmian/Gaudier-Brzeskan image of Greek antiquity. Before her stichomythia with Ion, in which she first tells her own story as that of a friend, H.D. tells us that “A woman is about to step out of stone, in the manner of a later Rodin” (172). Echoing Wilamowitz’s comments on Euripides’ depiction of legendary heroes that somehow feel human, she draws an explicit line from ancient Athens to modernism:

The play chronicles this double breakout: of a woman “out of an abstraction” and of the “ultra-modern” out of “our preconceived ideas” of the “classic.”

This takes place through sound, as H.D. carries over from Hippolytus the identification between Eros and “rhythm” broadly conceived. Kreousa’s “personality [and] unity was violated by this god, by inspiration,” we are told (203). In section xi, which H.D. calls “perhaps the most notable section of the drama,” Kreousa’s first transformation is effected (203). Inflamed by her betrayal by both husband and god, she sheds her cold mask, breaks down, reflectively revisits her trauma with the help of her father’s tutor (whom H.D. identifies with “antiquity itself” and whose characterization recalls that of Freud in her other writing),Footnote ⁴⁹ and finally consciously suppresses it, sublimating her betrayal into a call to action (203). At the core of this section is Kreousa’s anti-hymn to Apollo. In Greek her song is the inverse of Ion’s in the play’s opening: Both are anapestic and addressed to the god, but here instead of praising him as Ion did, Kreousa brazenly curses him. H.D. also echoes her version of Ion’s song through the repeated invocations, while also adding in many more repetitions than we get in Euripides.

In previous stanzas H.D. has already split up Kreousa’s initial address to psycha (line 859) into invocations of “soul,” “eyes,” “heart,” and “terror,” as if trying to delineate the different aspects of that difficult Greek word. In this particular subsection of the song in Greek there are four lines of relative clauses describing Apollo as a musical god between an opening vocative ὦ (line 881) and a second ὦ at the end of Kreousa’s main clause when she finally names Apollo, pointedly through his mother (line 885: “O son of Leto”). H.D. emphasizes these musical aspects through repetition but leaves the last line ambiguous. While in Greek Kreousa vows to bring forth her accusations in the light of day (i.e., not in secrecy) as she is indeed now doing, H.D. suggests that Apollo’s treachery was especially brutal because of his identity, because he is “within the light,” whether the light of day or the metaphorical light of art and music. Indeed, throughout the play H.D. takes any mention of the sun to be a reference to Apollo and simply transcribes and capitalizes the Greek word (Helios), while also adding or repeating references to light.Footnote ⁵⁰

The seduction, rape, and aftermath are also represented musically here, suggesting once again the inescapability of Eros and the interconnectedness of “metres” and violence. The stanza is pervaded by initial and final rhymes: H.D.’s repetitive additions of “eyes,” “against,” “you,” and “yes” in the openings of her lines and the “heart,” “out–shout,” and finally, “delight–bright–light” rhymes at the ends. Together, these two series highlight the problem at hand; namely, that the god of harmony produces no harmony but only the discord implied in the failed middle rhyme between “Muses” and “accuse.” Yet Kreousa has recourse to his very “harmony” while trying to denounce him. This is encoded metrically as well. As soon as Apollo’s “harmony” is evoked, in the sixth and seventh lines cited above, H.D.’s lines become suddenly longer and clearly iambic. Throughout this song, in fact, the few longer lines have stress alternation (usually iambic or anapestic) and are all associated with music or the abandonment of Ion:

Similarly, the seven lines describing Kreousa and Apollo’s encounter are consistently trimeters (e.g., “why did you seek me out,” “while the flowers fell from my lap”); only when Kreousa begins to describe her resistance to Apollo does H.D. turn back to her customary very short, often single-stress, lines (210–11). H.D.’s use of metrical regularity, then, points to Apollo’s continuing hold on Kreousa, tying violence to verse and the earlier rape to its recollection. Metrical disturbances encode instead Kreousa’s attempted resistance that, however, only leads to her own undoing: “no help / came to me” (211). The three-stress lines return at the end of the rape stanza in very different form: “O, white hands caught,” “O, gold flowers lost” (211). We see here that clustering of stresses familiar from Phaedra’s mad speech – not coincidentally, the two passages are in the same meter in Greek – which signifies Kreousa’s own increasing distress.

H.D. saves for the end of Kreousa’s anti-hymn one particularly resonant image, which in Greek occurred in the passage whose translation I cited above (“O, eyes”): κέρασιν ἐν ἀψύχοις “on the lifeless horn” (line 883). She adds an entire final stanza, comprising a medley of words from her earlier stanzas; it thus functions as an epode or coda to Kreousa’s song and adds coherence and internal consistency to H.D.’s own composition.

H.D. brings forth a connection – present in the Greek but not so explicitly made – between Kreousa’s initial apostrophe to her soul (ψυχά, psycha) and her designation of the “horn” (H.D.’s “harp”) as “soulless” (ἀψύχοις, apsychois). She implies that Apollo played Kreousa like one of his instruments – and “pluck” is a stronger word than Euripides’ ἀχεῖ (achei) ‘sound’ – tearing her soul away from her body, leaving behind that sculptural, inorganic Kreousa, and not sheltering what came of their communion, the product, Ion.

But, now that she is “rid of” “this secret” and has exposed her human vulnerability, Kreousa moves from one abstraction to another one (210). H.D. manipulates the interaction between Kreousa and the tutor towards a double effect. First, it comes to resemble a psychoanalytic session through the particular vocabulary used and the depicted trajectory. Second, she has Kreousa hatch the plot against Ion on her own, by reducing the tutor’s role and cutting a fifty-line speech in which he primes her for revenge. By consciously repeating her old crime – as she then killed a child by exposure in order to save her city from shame, so now she concocts a plot to kill a slightly older child by poison in order to save her city from falling into the wrong hands – Kreousa, briefly humanized, retreats back into the marble, sublimating her trauma into dangerous action.

The identification with Athena is the anchor of H.D.’s Ion’s victory narrative, but not in the way that is implied here. For this plan against Ion is bound to fail, and, seeking refuge at Apollo’s temple, Kreousa returns to her womanly body. “I am safe with the god,” she claims right after Ion confronts her (236). When he asks “what is the god to you?,” she responds that “my body is his, by right” (236). H.D. heightens the suggestion present in the GreekFootnote ⁵¹ that it is not the religious power of the altar but her stronger connection and earlier encounter with Apollo in particular that gives Kreousa confidence. This is the functional equivalent of the Blanchotian leap, as Kreousa takes possession of Apollo’s hold over her for her own benefit. In this moment H.D. also qualifies her insistence on modernity – and the modern, or modernist, trend against classicism and towards primitivism – by pushing back against the idea that Kreousa is a “‘savage,’” “frenzied” woman who acts simply out of jealousy: “Kreousa retains, at the last her unquestionable authority” (214–15). Indeed, by deliberately returning to Apollo, her author-ity is precisely what Kreousa/H.D. reasserts. Having moved through both archetypes (“statue,” “frenzy”), Kreousa takes over her own story.

“How will we approach it?”: Visions of Athens

Though H.D. is more interested in a defense of art and its “irrationality” – in Apollo’s law as formulated in “Murex” – one of the consequences of this strategy is that it would also seem to commit H.D. to Athenian supremacy, since the two are intertwined through the appearance of Athena at the end of the play. H.D. omits the goddess’s lengthy predictions about the great future of Athens and the Ionic race,Footnote ⁵² but offers a substitute in her four-page commentary. Seeming to speak for the goddess, giving us a supplement to – or a modern reading of – the Ionic legacy Euripides’ Athena expounds, the commentator trades Athenian military imperialism for its artistic or cultural imperialism.

In the midst of platitudes about the great fifth century, we detect H.D.’s somewhat subversive hand. We are encouraged to read classical “perfection” as emerging out of the unconscious, as a kind of in-spiration from within, an abstract, impersonal force creating very human artifacts: “the heel of an athlete or the curls of a god or hero, the head-band of a high-priest” (254).Footnote ⁵³ This would be evident in the Euripidean play itself, its choral songs shading the skepticism of its plots. Moreover, in H.D.’s recasting of the play, it is Kreousa and not Ion who is implicitly aligned with what the commentator identifies as “Ionian”; we actually hear very little about Ion’s future in Athens or about his descendants, since those are exactly the sections that H.D. skips. The dehumanization outlined above – or rather, this movement in and out of the human, and of abstraction – we have seen most clearly in H.D.’s characterizations of Kreousa: at first a statue, then a woman reaching a high point of emotional turmoil, and once again transformed through her human suffering into a goddess, only to finally accept and defy her own human vulnerability. Critics have written about H.D.’s imaginative shift from portrayals of crystalline youths in her early and middle period to those of mother-goddesses;Footnote ⁵⁴ this play enables that shift, since under the name of Ion, it is Kreousa who is celebrated. It is Kreousa who exhibits that “welding of strength and delicacy” that H.D. so insists on as the mark of the Ionian – and that was the admired quality of the flowers featured in H.D.’s early work. “The sea-violet / fragile as agate, / [that] lies fronting all the wind” is closer to Kreousa rather than to violet-Ion (CP 25). Through Kreousa, then, H.D. is rewriting her own poetic origin story, just as she imagines Euripides to be doing for himself in the play.

Despite the Freudian rhetoric, moreover, the understanding of art as a good-enough substitution for something more dangerously desirable is absent even in these fairly conventional passages about Athenian greatness. Freud himself was drawn in not by the Hellenic cultural ideal but by what he read as the triumph of reason. He wrote to H.D. that he was “Deeply moved by the play … and no less by your comments, especially those referring to the end, where you extol the victory of reason over passions” (Tribute to Freud, 194). He is referring, I believe, to this passage:

Should we trust the commentator’s proclamation that Athena leaves no loose threads? When she first appears in H.D., after this very long introductory commentary, she ambiguously declares that she has come “to reveal / mystery,” not necessarily to shed light on it (259). In Euripides, in contrast, she refers more explicitly to her intention to resolve this affair and make known Apollo’s predictions for Ion’s future, which are precisely what H.D. suppresses (lines 1569–70). Even in the passage just cited, our abstract understanding is curiously identified with “the light of the mind’s vision,” not with reasoning. Moreover, H.D.’s Athena presents coherence as guaranteed by divine power: Though “the gods’ pace moves slow,” she says, they do not forget, and therefore one should “wai[t]” for, not “doub[t],” “the end / of the intricate / plan” (260).Footnote ⁵⁵ The commentator transposes Athena’s advocacy for the now-antiquated belief in the gods onto the unconscious, the “hidden subterranean forces” that we should similarly not thwart but have “the desire actually to follow” (254). H.D.’s consistent reliance on the shell analogy points to art as the place where desire is revealed; classical works of art, “no matter how dissimilar,” are again described as having “yet one fundamental inner force that framed them, projected them, as (we repeat) a certain genus of deep-sea fish may project its shell” (255). Artistic production is figured as an almost automatic process without any sense of particularly human, or rationally arrived-at achievement. A whole culture somehow fishes the murex up – or, more accurately, is the murex – as H.D. turns Athenian hyperintellectualism into the imprint of the creative unconscious – which can for this reason be accessed again.

It is to the question of access that the commentary turns next. H.D. offers an elaborate parable that both illuminates her understanding of “vision” and makes an implicit argument for how to connect the modern and ancient. “Today, again at a turning-point in the history of the world,” she writes,

In oblique answer to this question, H.D. immediately tells a seemingly unrelated story that is probably inspired by PausaniasFootnote ⁵⁶ and that will reappear in different guises in Trilogy. Throughout the play she has drawn attention to Athens defeated (e.g., 166), and she returns to this theme here, again ostensibly as a supplement for the Ionic legacy cut from the translation. Yet even as she narrates the conventional tale of Athens – a “lost city” after the Persian Wars that rose from its ashes and rebuilt the Acropolis into something greater than it was before – she locates her and our “approach” through a tale of excess and apparent (but in the end justified) transgression, in some ways parallel to Kreousa’s late appeal to Apollo. After the destruction of Athens, “Tradition has it that one devote [sic] scrambled back,” thus unwittingly rejecting the deep-seated belief according to which the death of the olive tree planted by Athena on the Acropolis meant the death of Athens (256). This “devote” defied also the “injunction of his goddess” – namely, “Of nothing, too much” – since, by going back, he sought “of one thing too much”: of “the beauty of pure thought,” of Athena, of Athens (256). Of course what leads him to defy Athena is not pure thought, but “love for our lost city” (256). At the beginning, then, of Athens’s most famed greatness would be this act of defiance, of rebellion against the very goddess that is being held onto, something that exceeds this beauty of pure thought, of moderation, of coherence, that is nonetheless fated to reinstate it. For the unnamed Athenian then discovers “a frail silver shoot” next to the olive tree stump. “It reached toward the light. Pallas Athené, then, was not dead. Her spirit spoke quietly, a very simple message” of hope – which he later delivers to his people: “Our old tree is not dead” (257). What revives Athens, allowing it to produce the exquisite Ionian shells that were here momentarily rejected, is something un-Athenian.

The image of the olive tree – representing both desire beyond reason and its equally mysterious fulfillment – serves to tie together the temporal and communal planes between which H.D.’s Ion has been operating. First is the connection to the play itself, which is left unspoken. In the previous section, the recognition between Ion and Kreousa was sealed by the presence in Ion’s baby basket of an ever-fresh olive crown, made from the same Athenian tree. Having bridged the gap between the historical and the mythic – and perhaps implying too that it was such Athenian lore that led Euripides to include this detail in his play – H.D. concludes this excursus, this parable for “how to approach it,” by bearing the message herself. On all her visits to Athens, she reports, she too found that olive: “numerically 1920, 1922 and again (each time, spring) 1932, we touched the stem of a frail sapling, an olive-tree, growing against the egg-shell marble walls of the Erechtheum” (257). Binding ever-larger communal units – the intimate but estranged family of Ion and Kreousa, the Athenian survivors of the Persian Wars, the past and present audience of the Ion as well as visitors to Athens – the surviving olive sapling serves to ground myth and poetry in the cycle of nature. On the one hand, then, H.D. would seem to insist on the continuity of place and on the specificity of the Acropolis, on a shared “Greekness.” But on the other, by using a plant as the ultimate synecdoche for Athens – instead of a column, a manuscript, or a sculpture as earlier in the commentary – she also suggests that the “miracle” is not very much of one:Footnote ⁵⁷ Trees grow (or can be replanted); one just has to look for them, to “desire actually to follow” and attend to the “living flame,” as Walter Benjamin puts it. Or, to use his own plant metaphor in “One-Way Street”: A translation is only the “seasonally falling frui[t]” off the tree of the profane text (449).

Apollo’s non-appearance in the play – a telltale sign of Euripides’ irony for Verrall – is likewise transfigured by H.D. to emphasize the process of transmission rather than any individual recipient of “truth” or “mystery,” and to accord with Kreousa’s instrument metaphor. Like Eros in the Hippolytus stasima and in HT, Apollo’s trace is felt even when he is absent or explicitly denied. H.D. frequently refers to him as the “Voice”; while this identification must have initially arisen from references to the oracle in the Euripidean text,Footnote ⁵⁸ she definitely goes beyond the Greek in using it. In his opening song Ion refers to “the magic oracular / Voice / from the altar” (157; this is absent from H.D.’s early translation). Kreousa says she “cannot accept / the Daemon, / but I accept / the Voice,” dissociating the anthropomorphic god and his reprehensible actions from the singing power of the oracle; still, the commentary later reports that Xouthos “has been given a son by this Voice, that betrayed her in her girlhood,” suggesting that the two may not be separable (184, 214). In H.D.’s translation of the first stasimon, the chorus ask Athena and Artemis to “pray to the Voice, / pray to the tripod” (188; nothing equivalent in the Greek). Finally, when Ion asks the Pythia about her decision to reveal that he was found in a basket, she answers “the Voice spoke to my spirit” (241; “Loxias” in Greek [line 1347]). H.D. thus turns Apollo into an omnipresent, ill-defined yet sound-bound force that is impossible to pin down and have speak directly, and that is not altogether benevolent – again, much like the Eros of the Hippolytus. When he makes Athena into his mouthpiece at the end of the play,Footnote ⁵⁹ H.D. presents her literally in the light of her brother. She interprets the word antēlios ‘opposite the sun, that is, looking east,’ used by Ion to describe Athena’s appearance, as expressing the boy’s confusion of “this emanation of pure-spirit with that other, his spirit-father, her actual brother of Olympos” (254).Footnote ⁶⁰ She expands Ion’s sighting of Athena from four to eighteen lines, heightening his sense of fear and uncertainty regarding this apparition, and concluding with an alignment between the two gods: “O, face / like the face / of Helios” (253). H.D. thus sets the stage for her suggestion in the following commentary that the love of Athens led the “devote” to break the injunction: It is only through Apollo, reconceived through Eros, that what Athena promises and stands for becomes visible.

“The way to a return”: The Translator’s Trade

H.D. seemed to claim above that the acknowledged greatness of Greece ought not to provoke numb admiration or dejection, but function as a call to action, a call to remember the “Hellenic past.” Yet, despite the idealizing Winckelmannian trappings of her rhetoric, she redefines the term so that the “Hellenic past” is not Freud’s perfect reason, nor even that balance between conscious and unconscious forces so praised by the commentator, but the disruption, the dis-cord struck to give rise to it. There is nothing triumphant about this remembering. It happens “somehow”; we do not know how the messenger “g[o]t back to his people” or exactly what he said “when he finally overtook them, perhaps on the old, sacred Eleusinian highway” (257). Similarly, the commentator’s surprising identification of Athena qua weaver as the figure “fitly presid[ing] over” the tightly plotted Greek drama (224) is undercut not only by the loose ends in this plot itself even in H.D.’s own tightened and polemical version, but by many other moments in the commentary where she is constantly picking on such loose threads.

The commentary keeps returning to questions of staging and visualization (e.g., on pages 159, 165, 166, 190, 192), which, on the surface, seem to be historical performance questions, philological questions, or questions about intention. How was this play put on in the fifth century? How did Euripides want it? If we do not know, what can the translator do? Questions, that is, that to some degree are answered or evaded in every introduction to a translation of a classical play. Here, however, we are asked to think not only about how this play was staged two thousand years ago and how we should go about it now, but, more specifically, about how much can survive in language – Greek or not – in a poem, or in a play. Can we, to paraphrase Woolf, “hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek” or in English?Footnote ⁶¹

It is the smallest, most apparently straightforward scenes that exercise the commentator, precisely because in their simplicity or sparseness, so different from the choral songs or character monodies, they provide little with which to inflame the imagination in a particular direction. In the commentary to section ix, in which Xouthos exits from the temple having received the oracle, the commentator wonders:

She seems to answer her own question when she imagines music breaking across, “a clash as of muffled cymbals from within the temple” (192). She nonetheless continues her meditation on the absence of stage directions. When Xouthos exits the temple, “the words of the poet” simply say “he is here” (192). “What does that signify?,” the commentator asks, and offers us a variety of options: Is it a “conventional remark,” an answer to a question, or an exclamation? She herself has already decided in favor of the last: “as the king, born of a son of a son of Zeus, stands in royal robes…. The light of music, song, rejoicing shines from his face” (192). At moments like these, H.D. uncovers her own process of reconstruction, her choice being one among many. Indeed, in the next breath, she pulls back from even this certainty as she moves on from appearance to human psychology: “Does Xouthos walk slowly,” “Does he stand and look at the boy,” “does his voice resound instantly”? (192). This time no option is privileged over the others.

Throughout the translation, even in light of the intricate plan that is revealed, H.D. points to the many unknowns. Section viii consists of an even shorter speech by Ion, who asks the chorus what the oracle has told Xouthos. “We do not know,” the commentator tells us, what Ion has been doing while the chorus sang in the previous section. She nonetheless proceeds to precisely list the possibilities, some stereotypically “classical,” others “romantic”: sitting thoughtfully, wandering about, “erect in some rapt pose,” “or whether he walked away with the last tragic questioning about the purpose of his divinity” (190). H.D. claims to have separated her sections on the basis of characters’ entrances and exits, but here she implies that even that principle of organization is faulty; we do not know if Ion has entered or if he has been onstage all along.Footnote ⁶² Since, moreover, in this section the commentary overwhelms the translation in length, we are inclined to consider Ion as a character through the commentary rather than his speech. As a chorus might, the commentary pursues a line of questioning that he himself avoided when he earlier asked Kreousa not to bring up his own status as a foundling (p. 179 in H.D., line 361 in Euripides). This makes us read differently Ion’s very plain words that follow:

Is he suppressing his own desire to question the tripod about his parentage, or is he curious because he trusts the oracle less now that Apollo’s misdeeds have been revealed? Or is he simply asking a banal question?

H.D.’s pared-down translation of the play’s dialogue further suggests that the survival of the drama and the possibility of a relation to antiquity are not taken for granted, but are, like Kreousa’s inspiration, a risk. The commentator compares Kreousa’s and Ion’s manner in their first stichomythia to “that of skilled weavers” as they respond to each other in “perfectly matched statements” and produce a “sustained narrative” (174). Though she seems wistful at not being able to capture this, her choice of “broken, exclamatory or evocative vers-libre,” which she admits is “the exact antithesis of the original,” is telling in the context of her general reversal of the play (174).Footnote ⁶³ Each of H.D.’s lines is framed by dashes, which may convey a sense of continuity, as if one character is filling in the other’s lines or words, but inevitably also conveys a sense of interruption. (The dynamic in this sense evokes that between Hippolytus and Artemis in the first act of HT.) In a similarly fast-paced dialogue between Xouthos and Ion, in which Xouthos claims him as his son, H.D. seems to present the unraveling of drama, rather than the drama itself:

With just the barest bits and pieces to evoke a psychological reality, it is left up to our imagination to fill in the “action,” to see the scene and contribute to it. Being presented with the ancient text, even in this translation, as a column to be reconstructed, we are literally forced to build modernity ourselves upon the remains of antiquity. To use H.D.’s metaphor from Bid Me to Live, she has made this particular trade with the words here; others may have been possible. This is the message that the commentator delivers, from a moment that is both “now” and past and a place that is both actual and textual, speaking for readers ancient, medieval, and modern. In the partially reconstructed temple of Apollo at Delphi,

He speaks “today” because each of us can learn Greek with our lungs. Each of us can risk looking for the potentially still growing single sapling or silver shoot – for our own Ion, who is defined, after all, as “one” “of the violets.”

Upon his return from a quixotic visit to the U.S. in the summer of 1939 in an attempt to convince members of Congress not to go to war against Germany, Pound announces to H.D. that it is “Now time to go back to an effort of 1912.”Footnote ⁶⁴ After asking for her thoughts on Ludwig Klages, he adds:

Perhaps expressing his resistance to Eliot’s Family Reunion, which had opened a few months before, and continuing with his skepticism towards tragedy, Pound tries to enlist H.D. for his new return to non-Athenian Greek. The mention of KlagesFootnote ⁶⁵ suggests that he is interested in ritual – archaism rather than Alexandria – as might perhaps be fitting for what he thought would be the end of his long poem, and its return to the question of belief. Now that Eliot can no longer be counted on, his Family Reunion as far from Eeldrop’s wryness as possible, he turns to his original Greek accomplice. H.D., however, had already gone back to that effort, using Greek translation and Euripides’ Ion to reground her poetics. Having defended her preference for “grand-period Greek” a few years before in response to a different letter from Pound specifically about the Ion (see this chapter’s epigraph), she now holds onto her position even more firmly: “I am afraid I am only picking up threads in my ragged intellectual tapestry – going back, re-reading classics, Bible, folk-lore … – nothing ‘original’ or startling.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Ironically, “classic” Athens is exactly where Pound will end up following H.D. to after the war, while H.D.’s faux-modest Athena-like syncretic thread-picking would lead to the monumental Trilogy a few years later.

Ionic Traces in Trilogy

There are multiple traces of the Ion in H.D.’s three long wartime poems, “The Walls Do Not Fall,” “Tribute to the Angels,” and “The Flowering of the Rod” (later collected as Trilogy), which point to the significance of that particular translation (rather than simply the completion of a translation) for the development of her poetic work. Trilogy is not only built around images important to H.D.’s Ion – the shell, the flowering tree, the still-standing building column/wall – but also puts into practice theoretical and formal insights distilled through the play. I will briefly highlight these here, though I will not be undertaking a full reading of the poems.

Trilogy offers H.D.’s most spirited defense of poetry and poetic vision during a time of war. The very first section of “Walls” plunges us into the reality of London during the Blitz; there is, on the one hand, “ruin everywhere,” yet, on the other, the buildings with their fallen roofs and destroyed doors now resemble ruined “temple[s],” their “shrine[s] … open to the sky” (Trilogy 3). And just as at the end of her Ion Kreousa at her least powerful nonetheless claimed Apollo’s power for herself, so here “through our desolation, / thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us,” and a kind of depersonalization follows: “we know not nor are known; the Pythian pronounces” (3, 4). As the images of the human skeleton and the charred building frame merge, the section ends on the question the whole sequence will be devoted to answering:

Trilogy’s broad synthetic and syncretic vision for what holds humanity together and gives value to human life goes well beyond what the Ion offers, but some of the strategies for presenting it were honed through that translation.

H.D.’s particular readings of Euripides, and what his “metres” say despite himself, allows the defense of poetry articulated, for example, in “Walls” 8. Just as the Ion commentator spars with Euripides’ skeptical readers, so here H.D. incorporates for the first time in her ostensibly “personal” lyric voice, the voice of critics: “poets are useless,” “we are not only ‘non-utilitarian,’ / we are ‘pathetic’” (14). The heightening of the issue in a wartime context becomes evident two sections later – “But we fight for life, / we fight, they say, for breath, // so what good are your scribblings?” (18)Footnote ⁶⁷ – and the critics then attack H.D.’s own favorite poetic means: “imagery // done to death,” “rhyme, jingle,” “overworked assonance, nonsense, / juxtaposition of words for words’ sake, // without meaning, undefined” (44). The response is an almost Poundian defense of the poet as the one who sets words straight, with a typical H.D. twist: “but if you do not even understand what words say, // how can you expect to pass judgment / on what words conceal?” (14). What words conceal is exactly aligned with her argument about Euripides in Ion: “for gods have been smashed before // and idols and their secret is stored / in man’s very speech, // in the trivial or / the real dream” (15). The whole sequence becomes an analysis of that speech down to the minutest and most incidental layer, for “even the erratic burnt-out comet / has its peculiar orbit” (45).

Trilogy thus examines “symbolic” or mythical figures for their modern usefulness and resonance (Hermes and Thoth, Osiris, particular angels, the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, the magus Kaspar) but does so through minimal units of sound/wordplayFootnote ⁶⁸ – through exactly that “discord” and its contingent, momentary form that H.D. had explored through Hippolytus. The motifs both of hatching and distillation are used to name the process, and sequences such as the following from “Tribute” predominate:

Before the figure, in this case Mary, can be approached, the word through which she has been denoted needs to first be “hatched” – “I know, I feel / the meaning that words hide; // they are anagrams, cryptograms, / little boxes, conditioned // to hatch butterflies …,” H.D. writes in “Walls” (53) – just as here the multiple paths of the sound mar are followed. Then it can be distilled into one word which may encompass them all (in this case, “Mother”) as H.D. consistently builds the same tension between accident and necessity that structured her Ion.

As in the Ion, moreover, the poems express both the desire to clarify language – to rectify names, as it were – and the resistance to naming the “mystery” or writing it in a straightforward way. That is, there is both distillation and equivocation, mirroring the competing movements of the Ionic choruses and commentaries. So, for example, after the Mary section, the speaker tries to “correct” Aphrodite’s name, having found this other sea-mother in the crucible. Since her name became “desecrated” – Aphrodite as Venus tied to “venereous” and “venery” – now “we” have to “re-light the flame” and reorient the name towards “venerate, / venerator” (74, 75). Yet, as soon as this conclusion is reached, the speaker cannot name the color of the newly produced jewel-word that would encapsulate Aphrodite. Though she describes it extensively, she insists that “there is no name for it” (76). Upon being instructed to “invent” the name she cannot find, she resists again, demurring from this quintessentially poetic act and undercutting a potentially triumphant poetic moment: “I can not invent it,” “I do not want to name it,” “I do not want // to talk about it,” she proclaims even as she keeps talking across the stanza break (76). What the speaker wants instead is “to watch its faint // heart-beat, pulse-beat / as it quivers” – as if naming would stultify the object of her attention, or make her stop looking – and “to minimize thought” so that she can “dematerialize” and be “drawn into it” (77). As in H.D.’s vision of tragic writing (where Euripides translates himself into the Homeric world), she wants to translate herself into the world of the word and speak from within, rather than bring it across.

One way in which H.D. does this is by redeploying here the central image in (her) Ion’s story of Athenian survival: the charred yet flowering tree, again presented in connection with the seashell. After refusing to name the new Aphrodite word, H.D. leaves her mark on the name of the angel Annael, whose n she doubles and whom she connects to Venus through both image and sound. “Annael – and I remembered the sea-shell” (79). “Walls” had imagistically opened with Ion’s final commentary on the charred city; its fourth section had featured the Ionic “sea-shell” (8). It was there admired for its artistic nature, self-sufficiency, and Athenian moderation (“master-mason planning / the stone marvel,” “it limits its orbit // of being,” “it opens to the tide-flow: // but infinity? no, / of nothing-too-much” [8]) – so much so that halfway through the section it was given its own first-person voice (9). But soon enough the shell was displaced from its pedestal as other figures for artistic production were added on – the mage carrying myrrh, the worm spinning its shroud – and art itself was doubted. In “Tribute to the Angels,” as in Ion and “Murex,” the seashell returns not as perfect aesthetic object but as carrying an unforeseen force. Following the memory of the shell, Annael, “peace of God” (79), proceeds to “set a charred tree before us” (82). Much like the Athenian in the Ion commentary, the speakers here “crossed the charred portico,” returned to the “old … square” that “Walls” had opened on, and “saw the tree flowering” (83). And as in Ion this is presented as both a miraculous experience and also one which is repeatable and open to anyone, so here:

Finally, as in the play the commentary leads to the introduction of Athena in the light of an erotic Apollo, so in “Tribute” this passage allows for the transition from the angels and specifically the Venus-associated Annael to Mary’s own appearance.

While “Walls” explores ancient and modern ruins, picking out helpful voices and processing negative ones, “Tribute” moves towards a positive vision – as if our speaker, having first surveyed them when departing, is compelled to scramble back to those ruins of Athens/London where she indeed finds a flowering tree and experiences a divine epiphany. Finally, “The Flowering of the Rod,” obviously combining the Ionic flowering with the biblical symbolism of both Aaron’s rod and the cross, figures its climactic vision as a translation convinced of its rightness yet aware of its contingency – just like the acts of Kreousa, H.D.’s Athenian “devote,” and H.D. herself as translator-commentator. Kaspar, one of the three magi, is listening to a voice coming from elsewhere:

Kaspar’s aural revelation is similar to those experienced by H.D.’s Greek figures who hear words or rhythms otherwise. What seems to characterize this sound and its message is the Benvenistean rhythm’s transitory form that defies customary oppositions. It is neither sung nor chanted nor spoken; it is new but old; it comes from the natural world (“echo in a shell”) and from the human mind (“the shell / of memory”); it translates itself, but Kaspar’s brain further translates it; it is heard by Kaspar but “connects us”; it is described sonically here but referred to as a “picture” later (165).Footnote ⁶⁹ Finally, despite its intensity, the account given here is provisional (“as it were”), and, despite the profession of understanding, the experience remains fundamentally mysterious: “no one will ever know how it happened,” or whether Kaspar “by his discipline and study” was uniquely suited to it (165). In H.D.’s version of the Pentecostal miracle as in her Ion, the “intricate plan” is revealed but only contingently – very much in contrast to Eliot’s in “Little Gidding,” to which H.D. may well be responding and which I will discuss in the next chapter.