On Not Translating Greek in “Burnt Norton”

The question that animates Eliot’s work in this period is encapsulated in the two epigraphs from Heraclitus that he used first for “Burnt Norton” and then for the Quartets as a whole:Footnote ⁹ τοῦ λόγου δ’ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν and ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή. Eliot had translated them thus in his college notes: “Though the law of things is universal in scope, ordinary people live as if they had their own insight” and “the way up and the way down are the same.”Footnote ¹⁰ Both quotations touch on unity and/in difference, on the individual and the pattern – the first in a social/anthropological perspective, the second in a processual or formal one. The Quartets constantly think about how to make space for singularity within the “pattern,” but also about the possibility of reframing the “pattern” positively, as a blessing rather than a curse. This issue is intertwined with the use of the past in the present, both historically and religiously: the possibility of positive, aware life in a fallen world in which we ourselves cannot be saints.Footnote ¹¹

Despite the commonality of logos (translated as “law” above) that the first Heraclitean phrase seems to imply, Eliot appears invested, at first glance paradoxically, in both phrases’ untranslatability.Footnote ¹² As early in the composition process as January 13, 1936, he has decided on using these epigraphs in an untranslated Greek – they replace an earlier quotation from Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” – fully aware that they “make the poem more difficult to understand than it would be without them.”Footnote ¹³ He would later explain that “The reasons for presenting [the quotations] in the original Greek is that it preserves their delightful obscurity. Any translation must be a personal interpretation and I had no wish to interpret” (P 906). In particular, “the word Logos is almost untranslateable”: “It may mean reason or explanation or it may mean word in the sense which was developed for the first chapter of St. John” (906, 907). Eliot did propose several translations in his correspondence, most of which maintain logos in Greek: for example, “Although the Logos is common the majority of men live as if they had an individual understanding” (907). His first recorded translation of the epigraph, written by hand on an annotated typescript of the poem sent to Emily Hale in early 1936, is more revealing of Eliot’s preoccupations at that time, since it brings up impersonality: “Although the LOGOS is universal and impersonal, most people go on living as if each one could have his own private philosophy of life.”Footnote ¹⁴ Despite his caveats, though, he seems quite certain in how he understands the quotation:

The second epigraph doesn’t pose a translation problem. Its rendering, claims Eliot, is “perfectly straightforward: ‘the way up and the way down are the same’” (907). But the interpretation problem remains: “as to what Heraclitus meant by it, that is a very different matter” (907). So, like Woolf, Eliot preserves the Greek as a kind of talisman of untranslatability, inviting a variety of interpretations. At the same time, even the most minimal understanding of the fragments’ content suggests that all of those ways of comprehending will lead to a “sameness” and are underwritten by a “common logos,” just as, materially speaking, all interpretations arise and come back to the same eighteen Greek words. This common logos or Logos will guarantee that our processes of groping will be mutually comprehensible even if our personal results diverge. We can then see beyond the apparent contradiction that the epigraphs’ non-translation produces: Their treatment by the poet comports with the interpretive avenue Eliot wishes his readers to take when faced with the Quartets. It also speaks to the poems’ theological aspiration towards universal truth – the word as the Word, which would promise translatability even in the face of apparent lack of translation – while also recognizing the difficulties inherent in that ambition.

The question is not a new one for Eliot, of course. Already “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” dramatizes it, both in Prufrock’s exasperated “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” and in the misunderstanding of his potential grand statement that he foresees: “‘That is not what I meant at all’” (P 8). One of the thunder’s instructions at the end of The Waste Land is “Dayadhvam” ‘sympathize,’ necessary because “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison” (P 70). The poem’s multilingual conclusion could be seen as an attempt, if not to bridge, at least to dissolve the bars of the individual linguistic prisons under the banner of “peace that passeth understanding” (P 77). In Sweeney Agonistes, Sweeney laments that “I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you” (P 125), a statement reiterated by Harry, the Orestes figure in Family Reunion: “This is what matters, but it is unspeakable, / Untranslatable: I talk in general terms / Because the particular has no language” (CPP 235). In contrast, Agatha, the Athena stand-in, holds out hope for communication despite the difficulty identified: “Talk in your own language, without stopping to debate / Whether it may be too far beyond our understanding” (235). This is what Eliot does in the Quartets.

“Burnt Norton” suggests that art, and especially poetry, “words,” offers the best way towards comprehending the paradoxical time it wants to explore. The poem’s gambit, as later that of The Family Reunion, is to “realize” “what might have been,” to make it more than “abstraction,” and accept that though “Time past and time future … Point to one end, which is always present,” human life does not have to be merely a “waste sad time / Stretching before and after” that eternally present moment (P 179, 180, 184). It does so not through direct statement (“the particular has no language”), but by creating a structure of experience through and between the words, as in the awkward juxtaposition of “time time” in “Only through time time is conquered” (P 181), or in the poem’s opening:

The line break emphasizes the performativity of Eliot’s “Thus” – less a syllogistic “ergo” and more of an analogical deictic here. The way that his written words reverberate in the reader’s mind is posited as similar (or even identical) to the statement preceding; they tangibly recreate what did not happen to us but happened to him (in thought). So, the past is available for imaginative reliving, whose value, the next few lines suggest, may not need to be purposeful or strictly intellectual. If we enter a literary text, we are already familiar with the conception of time and space Eliot is proposing, where what is or was not nonetheless is. The image of the “bowl of rose-leaves” emphasizes the importance of this “artificiality”: It is not the roses in the (already artificial) rose-garden that are accessed, but the trace of nature as plucked, selected, and even more artificially “set” in a bowl. What is reawakened – perhaps ominously (“disturbed”) – is a forgotten (“dust”) or passé artistic pattern; the memory of an old construct is being revisited and renewed as we re-enter this old house (“Burnt Norton”) and mind (Eliot’s/the speaker’s). The seeds are thus planted for the return to the house of Atreus.

In the poem’s fifth and final section, Eliot develops this idea of the privileged access a four-dimensional art may provide to the philosophical questions at the poem’s heart through the examples of “words,” “music,” and “a Chinese jar” (P 183). All of these are both moving – in that they unfold in time, whether in actualization (music) or perception/reception (jar from distant epoch/place) or both – and “still” because of “the form, the pattern”: the form which they embody qua artistic objects and the cultural or historical patterns to which they contribute and in which they participate (183). Eliot’s very word “still,” oft repeated here, encapsulates the process. It is grammatically multifunctional: an adverb, adjective, verb, and noun. It suggests both immobility and continuity of action; it can operate as both a spatial and a temporal marker; and it can be used to signify both agreement or intensification of a quality (emphasis) and opposition. “Still” is a condensation of the Heraclitean epigraph ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή. On a larger scale, Eliot gathers up in this section all of the rhetorical modes previously employed in the poem: religious, philosophical, imagistic, confessional/discursive, and literary or self-referential (insofar as specific images and turns of phrase from earlier parts of this poem return). They are all still here, still in use, and yet the poem is not still, jumping as it does from one to the next, stopping itself before it brings any train of thought to a conclusion:

Moments like these work to preserve a certain openness of interpretation, a certain opacity. As in the poem’s beginning, the form of the syllogism belies its promise of reason, turns into something else, collapses.Footnote ¹⁵ This is a strategy on Eliot’s part, as his letter to Hale about the use of Heraclitus strongly suggests and further letters to her confirm:Footnote ¹⁶ to get his readers if not to a common conclusion, at least to an experience of thinking together, rather than retreating “each in his prison” of definitive interpretation (or to the poet’s own). As with the epigraphs, the act of not conclusively “translating,” of not letting a reading truly settle, is what helps him do it. The object (the Heraclitean fragments, Eliot’s own lines) remains there still, like the jar; what it may “contain” is moving because it is what we make of it, over time. But that process of construction, contradictory as it might be, is common, is the one way.

I have lingered on “Burnt Norton” because I see Eliot’s return to theater and specifically to the Oresteia after the poem’s composition as a way of enacting and thus impersonalizing the “principles” articulated in the poem, which was not yet at that time the first of a series, whose pattern hadn’t yet become the pattern for a long poem. The Family Reunion allows Eliot to properly approach the issue broached by his first Heraclitean epigraph by presenting some kind of community of individuals who appear to be at odds – it could thus be said to lead him to conceive of and construct the ever widening world of the Quartets themselves. Indeed, as Eliot works on the play in early 1937, he thinks of it exactly in the terms of the “pattern” contemplated in “Burnt Norton”: He wants to write his characters in such a way “as to give pattern to the group, suggesting a kind of musical analogy – so that each has his part to play like an instrument in a small orchestra,” he tells Hale.Footnote ¹⁷ (In his postmortem of the play in spring 1939, he would admit that he got the “musical pattern right, but allowed it to dominate the action pattern too much.”)Footnote ¹⁸ The indebtedness of the remaining quartets to The Family Reunion has often been noted in passing, not least by Eliot himself.Footnote ¹⁹ Here I will examine the specific role that thinking through the Eumenides and through The Family Reunion’s particular failures and successes plays in the philosophical development of the poems, as well as the relevance of Greek (non-)translation.

S(h)ifting Aeschylus in The Family Reunion

The long-suspected indebtedness of “Burnt Norton” to Eliot’s rekindled romance with Emily Hale is confirmed by their correspondence, but Hale, an actress and theater teacher, simultaneously inspires Eliot to turn once again to drama. Greek drama and “Burnt Norton” are intertwined in his late 1935 to early 1936 letters that record the poem’s composition. These letters reveal the degree to which Eliot very deliberately thought about the use of Greek prototypes in the late 1930s, assessing both his own earlier effort with the Agamemnon and other Greek-inspired plays that he saw on the London stage during that time. Their correspondence throughout February and March 1936 features his frank assessment of his dramatic work to date. Apropos of criticism by a Miss Gilman apparently brought up by Hale, he discusses extensively the indebtedness of Murder in the Cathedral to Agamemnon. At first he defends the play by pointing to the merits of its chorus; he insists the arrangement of the latter is “not Greek,” and admits that “I am not a good enough Greek scholar” and thus could not imitate Aeschylean prosody.Footnote ²⁰ However, he is still committed to improving his work: “Very likely there is a better form of chorus to be devised.”Footnote ²¹ (Of course, The Family Reunion’s multiple attempts at such a formalist/ritualist element, a sine qua non for drama for the early Eliot, would eventually convince him to take the opposite path from then on, and work towards eliminating the chorus instead.) Having connected the purported obscurity of Murder to that of “Burnt Norton,”Footnote ²² he returns to Miss Gilman three weeks later. After the intervening letters in which he explicates “Burnt Norton” to Hale, he seems to have had a change of heart: “the criticism that I followed the Agamemnon too closely is justified.”Footnote ²³ Indeed, as I will argue more fully below, “Burnt Norton” provides guidance as to how to enter the house of Atreus with an eye to the future rather than to the past. The very pattern of the rose-garden passage in the poem’s opening – which recurs in The Family Reunion – aligns with Eliot’s developing conceptualization of the tragic: “In some plays,” he claims, “the tragic aspect is enhanced by one’s thinking of what the person or persons might have been in different circumstances.”Footnote ²⁴

In contrast, Greek-inspired plays on the London stage function as counterexamples for Eliot.Footnote ²⁵ After attending a performance of the Agamemnon (in Louis MacNeice’s otherwise admired translation), he tells Hale on November 9, 1936, that he is now convinced “that Greek drama simply can’t be put on the modern stage – half modernised and half fake antique (not the traditional fake antique of Praxiteles and Winckelmann but the equally fake antique of Cretan art – why Cretan).” Dissatisfied with the two primary modes of hellenism available – the purist and the primitivist – Eliot becomes increasingly confident in his own strategy of using Greek paradigms but ever more obscurely,Footnote ²⁶ and gets to it with some haste. By early March 1937, he proudly announces to Hale that he has written four pages of his new play. After completing a draft of The Family Reunion in late November of that year, he reports on Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. His assessment of O’Neill’s play’s “Greekness” is telling for his conceptualization of his own efforts at exactly the same time. MacNeice’s Agamemnon may have been too Greek (or at least too obviously mediated by a particular vision of “Greek”), but O’Neill’s play isn’t Greek enough. Mourning has a “simple Greek shell,” Eliot explains to Hale, whose extent can be exhausted by reading a one-page summary of the Oresteia.Footnote ²⁷ By comparison, he continues, “in so far as my play is ‘Greek’ it starts from the opposite end, or from the inside rather than the outside,” with the only outward sign of Greekness being the presence of the Furies. The connection, that is, isn’t one of surface – whether plot-based as in O’Neill or linguistic as in MacNeice – but one of depth, a more essential kinship. What O’Neill’s play is missing, moreover, by only externally following Aeschylus is “the Greek sense of the nature of crime and punishment”; Eliot’s acute perception of this sense will inform both the way he follows and the way he departs from the Eumenides.

While “Burnt Norton” allows Eliot to consider the question of pattern mostly philosophically, through propositions, examples, and enactments that are fundamentally not historical, it is its transposition into the somewhat more concrete and more historically – because textually – rooted setting of The Family Reunion that suggests the greater earthly intimacy of “East Coker.” The Family Reunion enables him to think at once about the religious or moral problem – the necessary pattern of sinfulness – and the historical issues that had so occupied him earlier in his career: the pattern of literary history, of tradition and the individual talent. It is in these terms that Eliot would later speak of the play’s twofold failure. First, Harry is an “insufferable prig”; that is, he does not provide an adequate model for ethical/moral action, and it is in fact his mother who is the more sympathetic figure, “the only complete human being in the play” (CP 7, 601). The play’s “deepest flaw,” however, is its “failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modern situation” (CP 7, 600). Because of these missteps, The Family Reunion fails to fulfill the purpose of theater in the present time of “chaotic … religious and ethical beliefs” (CP 3, 402). On the one hand, it does not function as a platform for the “social ‘usefulness’” of poetry (CP 4, 691), because it doesn’t quite manage to bring poetry “into the world in which the audience lives” (CP 7, 598). On the other, it also doesn’t fully “tend in the direction of liturgy,” which would counterbalance worldly chaos (CP 3, 402). Where Murder in the Cathedral may have succeeded quite literally in terms of the latter and may have tried to enter the world where the audience lives through a Brechtian (or Aristophanic) breaking of the fourth wall but “failed” because of its limited reach (an explicitly Christian-themed play performed in the context of a Christian festival), The Family Reunion fails in its ritual, community-building function.

A ritual is a repetition in the present of what has happened already as if it is happening anew – and it is the nature of ritual that it will keep happening. In Jane Harrison’s words, a ritual is “a thing re-done or pre-done, a thing enacted or represented”; it is commemorative or anticipatory.Footnote ²⁸ This is literal for Aeschylus in The Eumenides. He dramatizes the founding of an institution that at the moment of performance already exists: What is presented onstage is both the past (it’s already happened) and, within the confines of the play itself, contains the future (the Athenian judicial system, which is actually Aeschylus’s present). This confluence of times occurs textually for Eliot. His play in the present retells Aeschylus’s, so it has already happened as well, but it simultaneously detects (or encodes), if only barely, a Christian future in The Eumenides which Aeschylus could not have foreseen.

Crucially, the relation of present and past is what both plays are about: What bearing should a past deed have on the future, they ask. Should it be partially justified and repressed for the sake of an endless movement forward, as Apollo tells Orestes,Footnote ²⁹ and as Eliot’s chorus of aunts and uncles desire when they plead, “any explanation will satisfy: / We only ask to be reassured / About the noises in the cellar” (CPP 243)? Is absolution ready to hand, as Apollo argues in Orestes’ trial or as Harry’s uncle Charles asserts (“Your conscience can be clear”) when Harry suggests that he pushed his wife overboard (236)? Or is the past “irredeemable,” as the haunted Harry says when he first appears (234, 256)? This would imply that “all past is present … always present” and that, therefore, one will be forever punished, hunted down by the Furies (234). Can there be a reconciliation of the two? Much like Athena, the Family Reunion’s Agatha suggests that the answer is yes: “We must try to penetrate the other private worlds / of make-believe and fear. To rest in our own suffering / Is evasion of suffering” (268). Though presented in very different terms, the solution in both cases lies with the transformation of the individual case or “sin” into a communal affair.

The Family Reunion returns to the issues raised by “Sweeney among the Nightingales” around historical pattern and considers them more seriously, because they have now acquired a cosmic and religious tint. Indeed, Harry makes this connection explicit upon stepping onstage. After uttering the Aeschylean “You don’t see them, but I see them,” he uses the earlier poem’s concluding imagery to suggest that it is part of the same spiritual journey: He acknowledges that he “knew they were coming” since “In Italy, from behind the nightingale’s thicket, / The eyes stared at me, and corrupted that song” (232).Footnote ³⁰ The reliance solely on the artistic or aesthetic in “Nightingales” is now complicated as Eliot lingers on the process that leads from murder to potential regeneration (or further decay) instead of simply presenting it as a fait accompli. In “Nightingales” the action inside was moved outside as if to an outdoor theater. In The Family Reunion, Orestes–Harry’s pursuit and “trial” do not, on the one hand, take place outside, at the holy places of Delphi and the Areopagus, but inside the family home; on the other, though, the Eumenides themselves are the outside figures looking in and aiming to pull Harry out. The solution they are presumed to represent is never fully clarified on our stifling set except as the conscious, unblinkered decision to leave it – the same act performed by the man in mocha brown in “Nightingales.” Yet being “out” is not as simple here. At his most Orestean, Harry declares

The play’s goal is to teach him to live in this metaphorical house less agonizingly: the house of the individual person’s consciousness, of the family and of the world, but also the house of Aeschylus in which this play takes place.

What allows healing change in both plays is the integration of the Furies into a community of memory. This is what Athena promises them by establishing their sanctuary below the Acropolis, and this is what Eliot’s play implies and enacts for Harry. In The Family Reunion, the father and son are found to be more similar than dissimilar,Footnote ³¹ and the question of specific guilt is subsumed into a cyclical, unavoidable pattern, where (to use a phrase from “The Dry Salvages”) the “fruit of action” – whether either Harry or his father killed their wives – matters less than the intent (P 198). Harry’s discovery that his father had also wished to kill his pregnant mother doesn’t remove his own guilt (for having, or not, pushed his wife to her death),Footnote ³² but, on the contrary, allows him to enter a community of guilt – what Eliot calls the “curse” in a nod to his Aeschylean precedent, but very much aligned, albeit in a heightened version, with Christian theology – which paradoxically frees him of his solitary, private burden. “Now I can live in public,” he declares (276), and indeed he begins to show more empathy towards his mother Amy, apologizing, for example, for his bad manners (280, 286–87). At the same time, he more or less knows that his departure may kill her and, departing nonetheless, he fulfills his dead father’s aborted wish. The reunion of the title is, on the one hand, an ironic jab at the failed reunion depicted in the play (two of the sons fail to come, the one who comes leaves, the mother dies) but, on the other, suggestive of the real reunion that has taken place on a different level. Harry is reunited with his ghostly father and ghostly/surrogate mother Agatha, and thus with the old drama and the old house of Aeschylus, rather than with the family that mostly fails to constitute itself in the present. Harry puts it in exactly these terms: Upon realizing that “Perhaps my life has only been a dream / Dreamt through me by the minds of others,” he declares, focusing again on the moment of construction of the inherited legacy, “I feel happy for a moment, as if I had come home” (275, my emphasis). In contrast to Orestes, who thanks Athena for saving his more literal home and returning him to his homeland (Eumenides, lines 754–56), Harry relegates his material home to the care of his absent brother, and to its natural cycle of life: “Let the cricket chirp” (281).

At the turning point of the play Agatha and Harry develop the rose-garden imagery from “Burnt Norton.” Recalling the “tiny voices” also audible in the earlier poem, they enter into a trance, in which they explore different directions of movement that echo the Heraclitean ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή: “Over and under / Echo and noise of feet,” “In and out, in an endless drift,” “Up and down through the stone passages,” “Up and down. Until the chain breaks,” “To and fro. / Until the chain breaks” (276, 277). The chain momentarily breaks when the patterned actions are seen not as imposed but as imaginatively entered – just as Eliot has used his own house poem “Burnt Norton” to reimagine Orestes’ process of purgation:

The story Agatha tells of an action she chose not to take in the past creates a communal space – explicitly marked as constructed or “poetic” through the rose-garden imagery itself and through the connection to “Burnt Norton” – that both she and Harry, who was not yet born at the time, can now enter and freely move in. Without denying that “everything is irrevocable” – that is, that the past cannot be undone (an undoing attempted by Aeschylus’s Apollo, who declares Orestes “clean,” or by Eliot’s Amy, who insists that time has not passed) – Agatha holds out the possibility of redemption, just as earlier she had translated Harry’s insistence on the “unredeemable” into the “irremediable” (228). The future she envisions retains, indeed inhabits the memory or “burden” of the past, the “consciousness of your unhappy family,” but treats it as a kindly (hence, Eumenides) rather than as a hostile force (276, 275). This is a lesson for Eliot the dramatist as well, whose play does not “behave only / As if nothing had happened in the last eight [or two thousand] years,” as Amy instructs her guests to do and as faithful (however construed) stagings of Aeschylus à la MacNeice might imply (230). Still living in the house of the past (unlike, too, the “superficial” O’Neill), he instead uses what happened to construct a potentially different future, a properly “tragic” might-have-been.

The resolution of Eliot’s play is more equivocal than Aeschylus’s because both divine presence and deed/crime are attenuated, while the established system of justice is mostly an internal one and thus remains opaque. Harry leaves having secured some peace, but he knows neither where he is going nor why he is compelled to go. In Aeschylus, the Furies are persuaded by Athena to abandon their vengeful and bloody ways, so the shift is presented as an external change in world order. In Eliot, the process is fully internalized, even as the Eumenides are presented as an externalization of Harry’s conscience, an objective correlative of guilt. What changes at the end of the play is his own perspective towards them; he feels “happiness” in acquiring “a different vision” (275). Though the suggestively named Agatha (i.e., ‘good’) momentarily steps into their place – in the most minimal evocation of the Aeschylean conversion of Furies to “Kindly Ones” – the figures in the embrasure remain the same, and it is Harry who proclaims that “now I know / that my business is not to run away, but to pursue” them (280). This concurrent objectification and psychologization of the Eumenides – their use as a kind of Poundian “image,” both darting inwards and translated outwards – may be at the heart of the play’s “failure of adjustment between the ancient and modern situation.” For Harry’s different vision is facilitated by Agatha but remains his own, and the play, invested in maintaining opacity (also so as not to appear fully religiously prescriptive), offers no real way for anyone else to participate in it.

But it’s not for lack of trying. Eliot later spoke of having made “some progress in dispensing with the chorus” altogether here, and indeed he does away with the spectacular transformation of the Furies (CP 7, 599). Yet the play does have three chorus groups, suggesting Eliot’s abiding investment in the poetic, ethical, and community-building function of the chorus, as well as his commitment to making the ancient–modern “adjustment.” Aeschylus’s play itself has multiple choruses: the Furies, who are then transformed; the chorus of Athenian women, who appear at Athena’s instigation and who name the Furies as semnai theai, “Awesome Goddesses” (line 1041), sealing their transformation and uniting with them in a triumphant procession; and, we might add, a chorus that is not one in the assembled Athenian men of the jury, who do not speak but who join the procession at the end. Eliot’s choruses map onto those of Aeschylus, though they scramble their characteristics; each, moreover, speaks to a different interpretation of the Greek chorus more broadly. At the same time, each chorus is aimed at, or supposed to represent, the section of the audience that responds to each of the play’s “levels of significance,” per Eliot’s theory of the theater: the “simplest,” the “more thoughtful,” the “more literary,” and the “more musically sensitive” (CP 4, 691).

Eliot’s first chorus, the Aeschylean Eumenides, stay outside the house and are revealed when “the curtains part” to be “in the window embrasure” (253). Their appearance is always mediated/controlled by the pulling open of curtains – a mark of course of modern not ancient theatrical convention – which allows Eliot to tangibly question both the distinction between inside and outside and the “reality” of each of the presented worlds: Which one is the play? The Eumenides (whose name doesn’t change in the stage directions and who are never named in the dialogue itself) are seen by the play’s preferred “enlightened” or “literary” characters (Harry, Agatha, and Mary) but also, quite matter-of-factly (“them ghosts”; 289), by Harry’s chauffeur Downing, who clearly doesn’t belong to their upper-class, formally educated world – again we may view this as Eliot’s attempt to expand the reach of his “message.”Footnote ³³ These Eumenides are not only static, but also silent, an emblem of the remnants of the play’s ancient life and ancient theology, only accessible through our (psychological) projections. This would hold true both for those who don’t know Greek and, per Woolf’s essay, for those who claim to do so. So, the “more literary” members of the audience may catch the allusion both to the Libation Bearers and to Eliot’s own use of it in Sweeney Agonistes when Harry enters uttering Aeschylean lines: “Look there, look there: do you see them? / … / No, no, not there. Look there! / Can’t you see them? You don’t see them, but I see them” (232). But, Harry immediately adds that, though he had a presentiment of them, “This is the first time that I have seen them”; he thus marks both the renewal of the play – the redoing of its ritual – and the degree to which it is unknown (232). It is telling that Eliot later decided the Eumenides were unnecessary qua physical presences, erasing once and for all the ancient chorus.Footnote ³⁴ Though all three of his later plays would use Greek plots and echoes, none even attempts to transplant so visibly a part of the ancient work.

The second chorus is self-consciously formed by Harry’s uncles and aunts – “Assembled like amateur actors” – who “find themselves dressed for a different play, or having rehearsed the wrong parts,” suggesting thus the apparent incompatibility between the ancient play and the modern one (231). They are the stereotypical “average citizens”: willfully blind, risk-averse, not self-aware, occasionally cliché-spouting individuals, with some redeeming qualities, who are shown to acquire a modicum of insight over the course of the play.Footnote ³⁵ By the beginning of the second part, for example, they acknowledge that “In an old house … more is heard than is spoken” and resign themselves more knowingly to their impotence (“There is nothing to do about anything”) and to their daily pastimes (270–71). By the play’s close, they seem to have become even more attuned to the growing crisis: They begin by starkly outlining their human limitations (“We do not like to look out of the same window, and see quite a different landscape”), and end by admitting that “We have lost our way in the dark,” questioning “what are we, and what are we doing?” (290–91). Presumably this is the state that Eliot wishes to cultivate in his audience, shaking us out of our familiar crutches into spiritual questioning – turning us from plot-following “simplest” audience members to “thoughtful” ones. Immediately after the last joint choral song, each chorus member is given a solo line, as if to suggest the different (mostly mundane) paths down which such questioning might lead, their particular “adjust[ments] to the moment” (292). Eliot himself claimed to identify with one of the uncles, Charles,Footnote ³⁶ who gets the last solo line. It’s an admission of failure coupled with a hint of insight: “I fear that my mind is not what it was – or was it? – and yet I think that I might understand” (291). If the Eumenides, vocal as Furies in Aeschylus, are silent in Eliot, Aeschylus’s mostly silent Athenian citizens, split in their assessment of the two rival claims, are here given voice. Neither the supernatural nor the divine can be represented on the London stage, only the fumbling human responses to them.

The third and final chorus materializes once the aunts and uncles have left the stage and is comprised of Agatha and Mary, the Athena and Elektra figures. They are educated, perceptive, and yet stifled women who assist in Harry’s illumination: They “create the god,” in Harrisonian terminology; are “only watchers and waiters” in Agatha’s (246). This is the “ritualist” chorus, aimed at the “musical” part of the audience. They speak in shorter lines (two or three beats each), occasionally rhyme, develop a refrain, while literally having to “walk slowly in single file round and round the table, clockwise” and to blow out candles “at each revolution” (292, italics in original). Surprisingly, given their placement at the play’s end and thus their alignment with Aeschylus’s chorus of Athenian maidens, they sound most like the Aeschylean Furies. They talk about the development and inevitability of the “curse,” placing “its operation” “in the night time / And in the nether world / Where the meshes we have woven / Bind us to each other,” and egging each other on to “Follow follow” (repeated four times). But in re-doing the past, they also undo it and pre-do the future: “So the knot be unknotted / … / And the curse be ended,”Footnote ³⁷ a goal towards which their present actions – “This way the pilgrimage / Of expiation / Round and round the circle” – are aimed (293). This chorus, then, is the one that embodies both forces: the cursing, binding of the Furies, and the expiation of the Eumenides. The play’s last line, uttered by Agatha – “May they rest in peace” – is the only explicit and serious indicationFootnote ³⁸ of the divine power that, in Eliot’s mind, has replaced Aeschylus’s gods, just as Agatha herself had “step[ped] into the place which the Eumenides had occupied” in the conclusion of her trance scene with Harry (293, 278). The Family Reunion becomes the “path that [Aeschylus] did not take” that echoes “thus” in our mind.

From the Reunion Back to the Quartets

The Family Reunion, like Pound’s Elektra, is torn between its two constituents – Greek and English, ancient structure and contemporary relevance, paganism and Christianity – and thus also struggles to balance its choral/communal and individual voices, to present clearly (though not necessarily overtly) the common logos that underwrites them. To end the cycle of violence it depicts, the Oresteia proposes adjudication: an overarching system that determines how you decide between apparently competing systems/ideas of right and uses arbitration to avoid arbitrariness. The Eumenides is ultimately more concerned with establishing a human system of justice that would complement the divine one than with the individual case of Orestes, and positions humans as being potentially able to mediate between two contrasting forms of divine justice (represented by the Furies and by Apollo), a degree of human agency that Eliot could not have admitted in his play; hence its open and somewhat unsatisfactory ending.

The different choral “voices” of The Family Reunion may be seen already in the multiple poetic registers of “Burnt Norton”; they are amplified in the remaining three quartets since in “Burnt Norton” it is Harry’s solitary philosophical and tortured voice that predominates. The intoning formal lyrics in the quartets’ fourth parts, for example, could function as Christianized versions of the Reunion’s ritualist chorus; the chatty prosiness or even “bad” poetry often seen in the second parts echoes the aunts and uncles chorus more mundanely groping their way, sometimes reversing course (“That was a way of putting it” [P 187]); the moments of silent conversion – recalling the (non-)movement of “still” in “Burnt Norton” – are presaged by Eliot’s treatment of the Eumenides. Even as they depend on some of the tools Eliot developed in the play (most centrally, that silent and invisible transformation of the Eumenides), the post-Family Reunion quartets can be seen as an attempt to tackle more conclusively the questions that Aeschylus poses – the enchaining curse or the cycle of sin/crime, the possibility of conversion or of reconciliation between earthly and divine, the link between individual suffering and the community – but by not relying on the tragedian’s own solution.

Despite its perceived weaknesses, The Family Reunion leads quite seamlessly into “East Coker,” the quartet most concerned with the different uses of the past. The poem is devoted to the thinking of circularity that The Family Reunion introduces without fully resolving. Near the play’s conclusion Harry says, “This is like an end,” to which Agatha adds, “And a beginning” (275). “East Coker” famously begins, “In my beginning is my end,” and ends, “In my end is my beginning” (P 185, 192). In its course Eliot moves from the single, negatively shaded reference to life in “Burnt Norton” (“but that which is only living / Can only die”; 183) to the acceptance of a biblically tinged life cycle in part i (“Houses live and die: there is a time for building / And a time for living and for generation”; 185), and finally to the more Aeschylean-by-way-of-Family Reunion dialectic in part v:

That the stones cannot be deciphered does not make them any less part of the family “curse,” and yet, as with the end of The Family Reunion or with the Heraclitus fragments, it is important for Eliot to maintain some opacity as a positive value. “East Coker” has already warned us not to impose “knowledge” or experience previously acquired onto the present and future, since “The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies” (187). Its second section explores the dangers of relying too much on the past, whether that’s construed as outdated symbolist poetics (“A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion”); as the legacy of “quiet-voiced elders, / Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit”; or the overconfidence of “old men” which is the product not of “wisdom” but of “folly” (187, 188). Such reliance would blind us to the present, to the fact that “the pattern is new in every moment” (187). “East Coker” v is now also telling us – à la Woolf – not to think that we know the past just because we have studied it: It too can remain a mystery and so, because not yet understood, form a kind of future, exactly as Eliot had attempted to construct it in The Family Reunion.

Eliot’s verse pattern continues to be performative, or dramatic,Footnote ³⁹ throughout the Quartets: a way not just to involve the reader in the production of meaning, but to use poetic means to enact or embody what the poem is speaking of. The lines cited above rhyme abc-acdb, even as the discursive tone obscures it. The disruptive d rhyme “only” – another favorite word of the Quartets – does what it says: The individual life or moment occurs within the pattern but also has its own contours, its own movement. (That the passage is developing the opposite/complementary perspective highlights this point.) In the present moment there may always be a surprise or small difference that could turn out to be meaningful or cause a slight shift in the pattern; hence the poem’s emphasis at the end on “beginning” rather than ending, on beginning (again) having accepted the end. It is this understanding of “life” that is carried on in the following quartets, with their ever widening frame of vision,Footnote ⁴⁰ and it is in this sense that Eliot can speak of the “life of significant soil” at the end of “Dry Salvages” v (200, my emphasis).

“The Dry Salvages” as a whole thematizes the production of significance, on both a moral/ethical level and a linguistic one. One of its polysemous kernels is the word end itself, as developed in the poem’s version of a Provençal lyric: the six six-line stanzas, unrhymed internally but rhyming across, that make up the beginning of part ii.Footnote ⁴¹ Detailing the difficult life of fishermen along the Massachusetts coast already evoked in the poem’s first section, this lyric exploits its intricate structure to let the “bell” clang differently, and better “measur[e] time not our time” (194). Its first and fourth stanzas wonder whether “there is an end” to the fishermen’s daily toil among the “drifting wreckage” and the “ocean … littered with wastage,” while the second and third claim that not only is there no end, but “There is the final addition, the failing / Pride or resentment at failing powers,” the further disgrace of aging (195). Accordingly, though in a single stanza there seems to be substantial sonic variation (no rhyme), the movement across stanzas, through time as it were, produces an inescapable pattern: the pattern of specific (word) ending despite slight differences or addition in (word) beginning. Whether “motionless” (stanza 1) or “emotionless” (stanza 2), “less” is guaranteed; that the rhymes are usually polysyllabic only reinforces the definitiveness of the ending. But the lyric ends in a conversion akin to that of Harry vis-à-vis the Eumenides. Conceding that “there is no end of it,” the fifth stanza implores us to think of the fishermen otherwise: “as forever bailing, / Setting and hauling” and “Not as making a trip that will be unpayable / For a haul that will not bear examination” (195). The focus is on the process, here communal rather than individual, not the result. In the sixth and final stanza, all of the first stanza’s rhyme words reappear to mark the closing of the poem in a kind of envoi, but with two key differences: “unprayable” softens into “hardly, barely prayable,” and “annunciation” inaudibly turns into “Annunciation.” The recursive pattern is still present, the chain unbroken, the toil not overcome or forgotten – much as the Eumenides in Eliot’s play remain what they always were – yet a little bit of breathing room has been found within it: the prayer that the temporal end (qua conclusion) might almost silently announce a more significant end (qua purpose or goal). It is in this way that our “temporal reversion nourish[es] / … / The life of significant soil” at poem’s end. Returning to time from the momentary sensation of the timeless, or returning in time to the soil whence we came, can be more than a necessary cycle of houses born and dying. The individual or communal life can signify into the future – “fructify in the lives of others” (198) – if one is attuned to its often silent tolling.

“Little Gidding” partly devotes itself to unraveling that process of signification – “the communication / Of the dead” – from the recipient’s end, and it does so dramatically, or at least dialogically (202). The second section in part ii depicts exactly such a dramatic conversation, using a famously complex arrangement of personae and a very self-conscious formal pattern. Building on his use of feminine rhymes for the Provençal canzon of “Dry Salvages” ii, here Eliot writes in a modified terza rima – of course the perfect formal structure for Eliot’s insistence on thinking enchainment and circularity together with slight difference/movement forward. Each tercet literally sets the pattern, but leaves an opening for something different, for a new pattern to be formed. Eliot thus formally gestures towards the relationship between past, present, and future that the Quartets have been building towards, both on the small scale of the tercet and on the larger scale of intertextual borrowings (Dante, Yeats, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Shakespeare, and others). But what “rhymes” has been converted. Other than in the first few tercets that help attune us to the pattern, it is not sound that recurs and alternates but stress placement: masculine and feminine word endings. That is, as in the borrowing of Dante’s description of and address to his own old teacher Brunetto Latini and its re-direction towards the “Little Gidding” speaker’s own “compound ghost,” structurally too Dante himself is silent, dead, “unidentifiable,” much like the Eumenides in The Family Reunion – but the space for that silence, for Dante’s felt absence, is made possible by Eliot’s speech.

What the dialogue with Dante exemplifies is what section iii spells out. For after all the dead tell us nothing – “We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum” – but what they allow, in commanding our attention, is a common grounding and groping (206). And it is on this note that the Quartets conclude, finally “translating” Heraclitus into the New Testament through the evocation of Pentecost. “Pentecostal fire” opens section i (201), is developed narratively in the second part of section ii (“the dark dove with the flickering tongue,” 203), and is brought to a climax in section iv. The Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit represents of course the quintessential moment of translatability, a recuperation of the Tower of Babel into a celebration of the union of tongues. The emphasis in the New Testamental account is not so much on the Apostles’ impressive new ability to speak in other languages, but on the fact that “devout men, out of every nation under heaven” hear them otherwise than they did before: “hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God” (Acts 2:5, 2:11). The scene’s conclusion echoes the Heraclitean common logos: “And all that believed were together, and had all things in common [koina]” (Acts 2:44). Koinos, the same Greek word, is now heard differently.Footnote ⁴² Just like Aeschylus’s in The Family Reunion, Heraclitus’s Greek is silently converted in the space of Eliot’s Quartets; the Word transcends language(s) indeed.

What the Tongues Declare

The move to the Eumenides made sense for Eliot’s artistic and intellectual development, as that to the Elektra would for Pound. Both poets’ subsequent shift to Herakles is stranger, since this hero is almost completely absent from Pound’s mythical imaginaryFootnote ⁴³ and only incidentally present in Eliot’s.Footnote ⁴⁴ But Herakles becomes central to Eliot’s work in the 1940s, providing the organizing, transformative image for “Little Gidding,” and the model for the transformative character in The Cocktail Party, a play based on Euripides’ Alcestis. Herakles was an “ambivalent hero” in Greco-Roman antiquity: “at one extreme he can be regarded as the greatest of men, a model to be emulated; at the other extreme he can be seen as an overreacher, the very exemplar of human hubris.”Footnote ⁴⁵ We see the former view, for example, in Euripides’ Herakles Mainomenos, where there is reference to his civilizing mission, and in Seneca’s (?) Hercules Oetaeus,Footnote ⁴⁶ as well as in Stoic writings, where Hercules is a “model of virtue.”Footnote ⁴⁷ We may see the latter in Sophocles’ Trachiniai; it is definitely present in Seneca’s Hercules Furens. The primary distinction between the Greek tragedians and Seneca, though, lies in the presentation of Herakles’ deification: Seneca consistently portrays him as a semi-divine hero (with some reservation as to the positive value of this), whereas even the more sympathetic Euripides avoids “any emphasis on the divine destiny of Hercules.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Certainly the Herakles of “Little Gidding” is Seneca’s,Footnote ⁴⁹ but Eliot’s later, less heroic, use of the character in his adaptation of Alcestis may owe less to Euripides and more to H.D.

Seneca’s drama, we recall, is for Eliot a drama of the “word.” His shift from the Orestean to the Heraklean myth in the Quartets, and from a somewhat close to a more distant approach to Greek drama, is mediated through that pure “word” of Seneca that “haunt[s] us more than we should expect,” and that in 1927 was preferred to the messier “real thing” of Sophocles (CP 3, 201, 197). Already since the 1920s, Eliot’s approach to Greek drama had been filtered through Seneca.Footnote ⁵⁰ Pound, for example, recognized the verse structure of Sweeney Agonistes as Senecan,Footnote ⁵¹ while even the choice to present the Eumenides as ghosts in The Family Reunion may have been indebted to the Roman dramatist. One of Seneca’s haunting phrases echoes throughout Eliot’s poetic, dramatic, and critical work, providing him with the frequently used astronomical imagery of solar fire and ice. The line appears, with some variation, in both of Seneca’s Hercules plays, and Eliot often recalls it in its translation/reuse by George Chapman in his early seventeenth-century play Bussy d’Ambois: “flie where men feele / The burning axeltree; and those that suffer / Beneath the chariot of the snowy Beare” (Act v, scene iv, lines 104–06).Footnote ⁵² The imagery is evoked and the line is cited several times in Poems (1920); via Kyd’s Hieronimo in The Waste Land;Footnote ⁵³ in “Ash-Wednesday,” “Marina,” even in the cat poems; and Eliot explicitly remarks upon its “personal saturation value” for him in “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism” (CP 4, 687).Footnote ⁵⁴ It is through this imagery that, in the closing moments of the Quartets, Eliot leaves Aeschylus, Agamemnon, and Orestes behind – together with “Little Gidding”’s other “broken king,” Charles I – in favor of a different myth that more fully redeems their story, not on the human level of the polisFootnote ⁵⁵ (as The Eumenides does) but on the spiritual one (P 201).

It is this Senecan language that is used to describe Harry’s future trials in The Family Reunion (“Moving alone through flames of ice,” e.g.); it re-emerges first in “East Coker” iv (“If to be warmed, then I must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires”) and then in “Little Gidding” i (“When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, / The brief sun flames the ice”) before it reaches its culmination in “Little Gidding” iv (CPP 274; P 190, 201). There Hercules’ “intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove” is evoked, and made to coincide with the poem’s separately developed Pentecostal imagery. Eliot relies on Hercules Oetaeus rather than Furens. The story in HO (as in the Trachiniai) is that of yet another spousal murder: It is his wife Deianira that has given Hercules the “shirt of flame.” But in this case Deianira herself has been tricked; she believes that the poisoned shirt will turn Hercules’ attentions away from his new lover and back towards her. That is, Klytemnestra’s guilt by deceit is replaced with Deianira’s guilt by accident – same fruit of action, different intent. This is brought to the fore in Seneca’s version of the tragedy.Footnote ⁵⁶

In HO both Hercules and Deianira are spiritually transformed. In the beginning of the play, Hercules lists his toils and complains to Jove that he has not yet been given his place in the stars (“But to me, Father, / heaven’s still denied”; lines 7–8),Footnote ⁵⁷ while Deianira vows to kill him because of his infidelity. Yet she inexplicably snaps out of it: “What’s this? My mind draws back and lays aside its threats, / my wrath’s retreated” (lines 307–08). Though she goads herself on, she does in the end decide that the solution to her problem is “not spears, armor, or the threat of fire,” but love (line 479). “Love will be the final toil of Hercules,” she cryptically declares, before praying to the unnamed Eros to “Loose love on him” so that he may “learn to love his wife” (lines 474, 554, 557). Ironically, her love, in the form of the poisoned robe, kindles an internal “sluggish heat” that “burns up [his] marrow,” which leads Hercules to seek an external pyre to extinguish it and himself (lines 1223, 1220). The play ends with a suggestion of the Trinity that cannot have escaped Eliot. As Hercules’ mother laments his death, holding on to his ashes, the hero’s reassuring voice echoes from the heavens; his very presence there confirms that he is god’s son, something that at the moment of his fiery death (and unlike in the play’s beginning) he had stopped demanding proof of.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Konstan notes, here “there is none of the doubt about divine benevolence or concern for humanity that marked the finale of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis,” since the play “ends in the triumph of a great spirit amidst the universal admiration of lesser beings who nevertheless participate in some measure in the transcendent glory of the hero.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Eliot signals this transformation of “love” through the word’s repetition in “Little Gidding” iv: “Who then devised the torment? Love. / Love is the unfamiliar Name / Behind the hands that wove” (P 207). In a literal sense it is Deianira’s love for Hercules that wove this shirt, but by the second line it is transformed into a love “unfamiliar” to Seneca (and indeed, Deianira hasn’t actually named Eros in her prayer) just as the pagan myth is into a Christian pattern.Footnote ⁶⁰

Eliot struggled over the composition of “Little Gidding” iv.Footnote ⁶¹ He had what became its first stanza from the start, but in the first draft it was the conclusion of a three-stanza poem. Kept unaltered in the final version, it becomes not an end but a beginning. Its imagery clearly fits with the rest of the quartet, also recalling “East Coker” and The Family Reunion. It is also perfectly aurally constructed.

The dove’s d physically breaks the air when we pronounce it in almost every line; by the time we get to “redeemed,” it is finally part of a long, stressed, and internally rhymed syllable, as if it has come into its own. The distribution of masculine rhymes (a) and feminine ones (b) echoes that of the earlier modified terza rima section (fittingly since it is its “dark dove with the flickering tongue” that’s being transformed here), while the final couplet’s c rhyme, neither fully monosyllabic nor disyllabic, reconciles them. Moreover, all three rhyme sounds in this stanza are remarkably close, with the first syllable of the disyllabic b rhyme rhyming with the a rhyme. Through their shared r, the b and c rhymes themselves are additionally slant rhymes with each other and with the a rhyme. The consistency of sound mirrors the definitiveness of meaning – “the dove,” “the one discharge,” “the only hope,” “the choice” – and thus the apparent certainty of redemption, while also performing the transformation of one thing into its “opposite” (“terror” dispels “error,” “declaring” dispels “despairing”) just as the whole stanza reframes the German bomber of part ii as the Holy Spirit. It prepares us, too, for the couplet in which – as in the Provençal lyric of “The Dry Salvages” – we are supposed to detect difference despite the identity of sound, even as we are also asked to align the Greek “pyre” with the Germanic “fire.”

But the poem’s second and now last stanza pulls back from this certainty. The Holy Ghost’s “d(e)” mark appears only in the first line, its stress lost already, before it gives way to what “devised” it, just as Deianira’s love gives way to the “unfamiliar” one. In speaking of that origin, the poem itself becomes less “devised”:

The stanza’s first two lines begin with metrical inversions, while “intolerable” makes the scansion of the fourth line tricky. Eliot maintains the earlier ababacc rhyme scheme, but now the rhymes are completely distinct; in fact, the a rhyme is mostly a visual one. The remaining vowel+r sounds in the middle of the lines are here tied wholly to the human, while the l and v of “love” become prominent (echoing, too, the previous section’s “behovely” refrain) though not as pervasive as the r sounds were in the first stanza. “Love,” a sentence unto itself and the start of another, is emphasized qua force, but its grammatical positioning allows Eliot to defer and deflect a capitalization that would be specifically meaningful (“Love” vs. “love,” mirroring “Annunciation” vs. “annunciation” in “Dry Salvages” ii). While “only” in the first stanza outlined a clear choice, here it is repeated, apparently tautologically, and yet is ambiguous in meaning. Is the implication that we live solely by virtue of being consumed, that that consumption is the one thing that drives our living? Or do we “only,” that is, merely, live when we are consumed, as opposed to something other/better than, or additional to living?Footnote ⁶² Is “suspire” a clarification of what “live” consists in (and thus a reduction of life to breath) or a metaphorical intensification (our very breath depends on this consumption)? Each reading produces a very different interpretation of the whole stanza. Finally, despite the surface similarity between the two stanzas’ couplets, “consumed” holds little of the promise of “redeemed.” The last line of the first stanza, moreover, presents a clear process with its two prepositions, while that of the second is again more ambiguous: Is “consumed by” a rough synonym for “obsessed with” (and one can be in this sense consumed by either the fire of lust or the fire of God) and so used in an active sense? Or is it passive? Is there still a “choice”? Hercules’ willed act of self-immolation doesn’t seem to be available in the second stanza, even as his “shirt of flame” takes center stage.Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, the transfiguration of the fighter plane into the Holy Ghost, a human-made destructive force into a divine creative one, also disappears here, or is further converted into a now internal force – for we recall that Hercules’ shirt causes his insides to burn – that cannot be quieted.

Despite its apparent certainty about “love,” then, the second stanza is calculated to take back the certainty of the first, to burn down its rhetorical and auditory fire. Just as it declares “love,” the poem begins to really “speak in tongues” (torment, intolerable), and, as with those gathering around the Apostles in Acts 2, what we hear depends on where we come from. This stanza admits more gradations of meaning than the first and more uncertainty about our fate, further diminishing our agency. It’s as if the poem is itself converted – just as Hercules and Deianira are in Seneca’s play – from knowledge into humility: from a pattern in which humans can play a part (similar to that envisioned by Aeschylus in his Eumenides) or at least choose the right fire for the right reasons to one in which they cannot and do not, and in which besides the burning (and all it entails: “the hands,” “the shirt”) there is no other certainty, in which “love” (and its rhyme, “dove”) remains unfamiliar to those who “live” even as it underwrites or comprises the common logos. The Latinate “suspire” definitely places “us” and our breathing below (sub+spirare) something and returns us synecdochically but not aurally to the “dove descending.” It replaces the Greek “pyre” (which has been stripped of its “power”) in the couplet just as Seneca’s Christian premonitions replace Eliot’s constructed Greek poetics. A similar buildup and perhaps less calculated deconstruction of the Heraklean image will take place in Pound’s Women of Trachis.

“The play is going on now”: Analyzing Herakles with H.D.

The reasons for which Senecan tragedy is appealing to Eliot – the allusive quality and feel of “belatedness,” the overwhelming sense of crisis, the “stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere” of individuals struggling with and against their passions, and on a technical level, the demotion of the chorus – also suggest its limitations: “we miss the sense of community,” Emily Wilson writes.Footnote ⁶⁴ Having more successfully reconciled the ancient and modern element through the Quartets’ latent development of Senecan imagery, and having established and justified a poetics of hearing the same differently, Eliot returns to Greek, freed of any compulsion to explicitly evoke it, and better able to take the opposite path from Eugene O’Neill, with not even a single external sign to declare his prototype. That is, both The Family Reunion (due to its “failure”) and the Quartets (due to their “success”) allow Eliot to move towards a different way of accessing Greek drama and its promise of community-building: not “Greek with tears,” but Greek with “no chorus and no ghosts” (CP 7, 601), with no explicit ritual or stylization, and no Aeschylus.

The ending of “Little Gidding” – the last major poem Eliot would publish – thus catalyzes the next stage in his career. His final three plays, all re-enacting barely recognizable Greek plots, feature mostly non-exceptional characters in upper-crust but low-stakes, apparently comedic British settings, avoid all explicit mention of religion or attempt at conversion – for that would be presumptuous – but toll the annunciatory bell no less. Just as “annunciation” may become “Annunciation” (or not) and “love” “Love,” a cocktail party may become the site of communion. So Eliot commits to an almost unabating naturalism in both plot and poetic style: He speaks of having followed his “ascetic rule” so well that “with such success … it is perhaps an open question whether there is any poetry in the play at all” (CP 7, 601). He not only changes his mind about the relative importance of explicitly marked ritual space and of theatrical realism in his art, but also about Euripides, to whom he now twice turns: His Alcestis provides a source for The Cocktail Party, and his Ion a model for The Confidential Clerk.

A few years after the play’s enthusiastic reception in both England and New York, Eliot mock-complained that the indebtedness of his Cocktail Party to the Alcestis had not been noticed:

Since then, the parallels between Alcestis and The Cocktail Party have been amply discussed,Footnote ⁶⁵ and I agree with Heilman’s conclusion that the play “seizes upon thematic material latent in Alcestis and dramatically explores it further, reinterprets it, and enlarges it.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Though in some respects this is similar to H.D.’s treatment of the Ion and Pound’s of the Trachiniai, the main distinction between their approaches is that Eliot’s play is not meant to exist symbiotically or in dialogue with the Greek play, but rather to supersede it. Hence Eliot’s pleasure at evading detection, with regards to both the source of The Cocktail Party and his transposition of Agamemnon’s dying scene discussed in Chapter 2, despite the “genuineness of the inspiration” and the truly many thematic and structural parallels. Eliot’s Herakles, the ingeniously named psychiatrist Harcourt-Reilly, proclaims near the end of the play that “Only by acceptance / Of the past will you alter its meaning” (CPP 385, my emphasis). Having finally accepted Euripides’ potential relevance for the kind of twentieth-century audience that he now wants to reach, Eliot too alters the meaning of Greek tragedy. Rather than leave us in the uncomfortable space chosen by Euripides as the conclusion for his play – Alcestis restored from death but mute, giving us no real sense of whether this is indeed a happy ending – Eliot has his Herakles teach the restored couple how to better interact with each other, and shows us a more congenial relationship between them at the end of his play.Footnote ⁶⁷ Unlike in The Family Reunion, where, unable to use Aeschylus’s solution, Eliot left the play more open, here he closes it up. Even though The Cocktail Party, unlike Eliot’s last two plays, maintains a martyr figure in Celia (essentially by doubling Alcestis into two female characters),Footnote ⁶⁸ whose path is supposed to be unknown and unfathomable even to Harcourt-Reilly, she too is given a parodic, self-referential end. Eliot thus institutes a black-and-white opposition: The “saint’s” path cannot but appear absurd to “most of us” who are not on it, even as it may catalyze change within the community. But, if the Quartets had suggested that art should be “still moving,” these late plays – despite keeping to the letter of the lesson learned in the Quartets – more tightly knot what, for example, Euripides only superficially resolves through a deus ex machina, and while they aim to allow for significant richness and variation in ordinary life, they fail to evoke it as Eliot humbly renounces the breadth of his own poetic talent.Footnote ⁶⁹

Eliot’s turn to Alcestis specifically may well have been motivated by a restored interest in Herakles as a figure, or by the fact that, as Heilman puts it, it is a play “virtually made for Christian readaptation.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, Eliot had told Emily Hale in April 1945 that though his most recent work was “hopeful,” he had not yet “written any poem around the theme of the Resurrection,” which is precisely the plot that Alcestis provides: Alcestis offers to die for her husband and does, but is then restored to life by Herakles.Footnote ⁷¹ Eliot may have known the prose translation of Alcestis by Richard Aldington, published in 1930;Footnote ⁷² he certainly mentioned admiringly in 1939 the Fitzgerald/Fitts translation that had been published by Faber (L-TSE 6, 162n1). It perhaps gave him the initial impetus for a post-Family Reunion play then,Footnote ⁷³ which he abandoned because of the war only to recall it after the revival of the Reunion in 1946. But what seems to me must have at least partially prompted his (re)turn to Alcestis in the late 1940s, and in this particular configuration, was H.D. Taking her cue from Freud’s own theories of psychic development for which Greek tragedy acted as a model or shorthand, H.D. imagines the Alcestis as the structuring plot for their psychoanalytic sessions in her memoir of Freud, “Writing on the Wall.” This account was first published in Life and Letters To-Day in 1945–46. Given that Eliot was a reader of the periodical,Footnote ⁷⁴ and that his Herakles is indeed a psychiatrist, I doubt it could have escaped his notice; even Pound at St. Elizabeths was reading it.Footnote ⁷⁵

H.D.’s account of her time with Freud appears simultaneous, off the cuff, but is clearly retrospective – a constructed narrative. The Alcestis pattern is presented cannily.Footnote ⁷⁶ As H.D. broods over Freud’s age and potential death, she offers herself up: “I would change my years for his … Put H.D. in the place of Sigmund Freud” (Tribute to Freud, 74). This selfless gesture is patently not what it seems, given the larger context of their power struggle, for H.D. aims to usurp his position, to claim for herself “the Professor’s” mantle. She does so here by masterfully manipulating the psychoanalytic scene. She “stumbles” into this desire, then prods herself into remembering who first articulated it – “Someone did it or offered to do it in a play once” – that is, into “realizing” the mythic/tragic pattern she is re-enacting in her life, much as Freud might unlock a male analysand’s psyche by aligning his desires with Oedipus’s.

In claiming this power away from Freud qua psychoanalyst and student of ancient tragedy, H.D. also proposes an alternative, and more resonant, myth for female psychic development: not Elektra’s paternal obsession and maternal hatred, but Alcestis’s self-sacrifice in favor of a male figure, an act that is both weak and strong. At the same time, as elsewhere in the essay, she doesn’t lose sight of Freud’s herculean accomplishment, and the way she formulates here – his resurrection of “dying children from the living tomb” – is positively Eliotic. In The Cocktail Party, Eliot’s psychiatrist Herakles explicitly offers “to bring someone back from the dead,” and when Edward/Admetus demurs (“That figure of speech is somewhat … dramatic”), he responds by insisting on everyday death and on the importance, and deceptions, of memory: “we die to each other daily. / What we know of other people / Is only our memory of the moments / During which we knew them. And they have changed since then” (CPP 329). It becomes the psychiatrist’s task to summon both Edward and his wife from their shell of a marriage and their world of spiritual death; midway through the process, the play’s martyr figure Celia even comes to see her former lover Edward “Like a child who has wandered into a forest” (362). In both H.D.’s account of Freud and in Eliot’s new Herakles we discern a social function that goes beyond having his own fight against death in the shirt of fire that Pound picks up on in Women of Trachis.

But besides the basic premise of Alcestis which both H.D. and Eliot thus extend, there are many threads present in H.D.’s staging that find their way into Eliot’s play. Most obviously: the sense of the play “going on now,” which suggests its timelessness, the lack of distance between “high art” and ordinary life, and the repetitive patterns of human behavior – for H.D., the model is Freudian, for Eliot, Christian. The play’s currency is reinforced by H.D.’s (or the psychoanalyst’s) consequent indifference to the identity of its creator, mirrored in Eliot’s own too-covert allusions in The Cocktail Party. Then, the “doubled part” is further elaborated on by Eliot. Like H.D.’s, his savior is vulnerable too, having more in common with those he helps than with the otherworldly Celia: Harcourt-Reilly speaks of his “limitations” (CPP 367), and doesn’t “understand / What I myself am saying” when it comes to Celia (CPP 368).Footnote ⁷⁷ Eliot also doubles his Alcestis into Lavinia and Celia, “the ordinary woman and the saint,”Footnote ⁷⁸ much as H.D. in the moment of writing is both analysand and analyst.

Eliot was, however, skeptical of psychoanalysis. Think, for example, of the list of fortune-telling practices that memorably opens “Dry Salvages” v (e.g., “To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual / Pastimes and drugs”) only to be contrasted with “annunciation” (P 199). His use of an analyst as his Herakles can be thought of as an attempt to wrest tragedy away from psychoanalysis by working within it in order to subtly provide a different model (much as H.D. herself is doing in “Writing on the Wall”). It is no surprise, then, that his Harcourt-Reilly cuts a strange figure. For one, he does not act alone, but as part of a fate-like group of conspirator-guardians, another one of whom is clearly superior.Footnote ⁷⁹ When we see him in action as an analyst in the play’s second act, he makes a mockery of the standard psychoanalytic process. He denounces both dreams and childhood memories, rejects the “marvellous cure” he could offer (CPP 348), reveals that he “made enquiries” and obtained information “from outside sources” about his patients when they were slow in expressing their true feelings (354), and finally lies down on the couch himself (357). Even so, H.D. seems to have recognized some similarity. In her 1955 diary she aligns her analyst Erich Heydt (as she perceives him, obviously) with “T. S. Eliot’s psychoanalyst in the Cocktail Party” (“Compassionate Friendship,” 96).Footnote ⁸⁰ “This is a Cocktail Party,” she adds, despite the absence of cocktails (as indeed they are absent in Reilly’s second appearance in the play, when he brings Alcestis/Lavinia back), because “there is a vibration, intoxication in the air” (96). She also places Heydt in a sequence of “initiators” – “Hermes, musician, healer, actor, charlatan maybe” (96) – from Pound on, which may include Eliot himself (141–42). That is, H.D., more attuned to Euripides, picks up from Eliot’s play not the note of the sacrificial atonement, nor of making-do in a world that is necessarily corrupt, but the disruptive energies implicit in Reilly’s appearance – not options closed off, but paths opened up that could be deceptive (“charlatan maybe”). Where Eliot takes H.D.’s Freud and trivializes him qua psychoanalyst while converting him into a figure that subtly initiates others into a Christian life, H.D. in turn maintains Eliot’s idea of initiation but makes her psychoanalyst even less “serious” than her Freud had been and closer to an artist figure like herself or indeed Eliot. Hence her transfiguration of Herakles into “Hermes of the Ways” (96).

H.D. is not entirely off the mark when she uses Eliot’s play to contemplate her own Greek poetic beginnings, for Eliot does so himself. Whether or not the impetus was given him by H.D.’s account of her sessions with Freud, Eliot sticks with Alcestis because it allows him to develop further the ideas and themes he had long pursued through his work with Greek. Unlike his version of The Eumenides or Seneca’s Hercules plays, Alcestis is a play that explores different kinds of social relations – between gods and men, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, guests and hosts, servants and mastersFootnote ⁸¹ – rather than focusing on an individual tragic figure. It is also a generically shifting tragedy; in echoing satyr plays through its rambunctious Herakles, it allows Eliot to return to his initial acted-upon approach to Greek drama through comedy.Footnote ⁸² The context of a party where characters come and go is reminiscent of Sweeney Agonistes, with Harcourt-Reilly acting somewhat Sweeney-esque in the first act (drinking, singing). The play also calls back to Herakles’ first appearance in Eliot’s work in “Mr. Apollinax,” which featured the following epigraph from Lucian: Ω τῆς καινότητος. Ἡράκλεις, τῆς παραδοξολογίας. εὐμήχανος ἄνθρωπος (“What novelty! By Herakles, what paradoxes! How inventive he is!”).Footnote ⁸³ Lucian’s audience, whose exclamations these are, is as aware as Mr. Apollinax’s hosts and fellow guests of his uniqueness, but cannot comprehend in what exactly it lies. “Herakles” is here a figure of speech. This Lucianic context,Footnote ⁸⁴ as well as the satiric nature of Eliot’s poem, do not suggest the hero’s tragic resonances nor a profound belief in his cult, but rather – as if he is at best a synecdoche for the characterizations in the rest of the epigraph – the audience’s bemused and ironized admiration for a different kind of man who, perhaps like the ambivalent figure of Herakles, is difficult to read. As the Mr. Apollinax of the poem disrupts afternoon tea, so Harcourt-Reilly disrupts and enlivens a cocktail party by revealing its previous dysfunction. Picking up this Herculean link, Eliot signals that he is in some ways starting over. He takes the questions posed in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” back in the serio-comic direction suggested by Sweeney Agonistes, rather than the serio-tragic one attempted through Murder in the Cathedral, developed in The Family Reunion, and concluded (if also undercut) in “Little Gidding” iv.

Thus, in The Cocktail Party, it is a different Herakles that Eliot turns to, and the challenge that he sets for himself and his audience is to not “ring the bell backward,” as he puts it in “Little Gidding” iii (P 206). For the most part, we are not asked to tolerate the importation of a ritual from a different era, but to convert a ritual already familiar – a cocktail party and, in the second act, a psychoanalytic session – into something only a little bit different. Eliot makes clear the particular nature of his intervention, of his use of the past and of the “foreign,” by offering and rejecting two possible alternatives in the play’s third act that roughly correspond to the uses of tragedy on the mid-1930s London stage. First, he mocks imitative art, through one of his more sympathetic characters, Peter Quilpe. Peter is writing a script for a film in which “the most decayed noble mansion in England” will have its decay studied by “a team of experts” so that it can be “reproduce[d]” in California (CPP 377, 378). The absurd exportation of decaying architecture for merely reproductive art is the equivalent of the modern staging of Greek tragedy “as is.” It then finds its sociopolitical parallel in Celia’s fate. Unlike the Reunion’s Harry, she has actually become a kind of missionary (“She had joined an order. A very austere one”; CPP 380), and, unlike Sweeney and Doris in Sweeney Agonistes, she has actually gone to a “cannibal isle” (P 121). In Celia’s Kinkanja – “an island that you won’t have heard of” – however, the “natives” have become cannibals only after the arrival of the Christians and after their conversion into Christianity (CPP 373). “So instead of eating monkeys [as the Christians do, offending the locals] / They are eating Christians,” we learn, and Sweeney’s threat to Doris that “I’ll convert you! / Into a stew. / A nice little, white little, missionary stew” is fulfilled (CPP 375; P 121). Eliot makes sure to remind us again, right before the account of Celia’s death, that “Europeans” have “of course” brought diseases to this island (CPP 380). So, then, when Celia stays behind after an insurrection to tend to “the dying natives” but is instead “taken” and “it would seem … crucified / Very near an ant-hill” (CPP 380, 381), any serious interpretation of her martyr’s fate has been undercut by the emphasis on the wrongheadedness, immorality, and indeed absurdity of the entire situation.Footnote ⁸⁵ As with the O’Neill Electra vis-à-vis Aeschylus, we see the surface trappings of Christianity but not the deeper process.

By presenting these two negative models of intercultural communication, namely imitation and infection – one looking backwards to the past and explored through art and place-ness, the other looking forward, towards cultural “progress” or salvation, broached through religion and British “culture” qua bureaucracy – Eliot shows us what (he hopes) his play isn’t doing. He is not attempting to simply transpose and reconstruct the crumbling manor of Greek tragedy (or the crumbling manor of the British upper class, as The Family Reunion or “Burnt Norton” might lead some to believe) after studying it minutely, and he is not preaching his religious beliefs. The play ends exactly as it began: with a cocktail party at Lavinia and Edward’s featuring the same guests – minus the crucified Celia, though the fact, rather than the details, of her death provides the impetus for a deeper discussion about guilt and responsibility. The remaining guests’ faults are not gone, their conversation is no less incoherent and superficial, and their pursuits are, if anything, more suspect. After all, we hear from the film’s screenwriter and from an agent of the British government in Kinkanja, while Harcourt-Reilly quotes an extended passage from Shelley’s Prometheus, exactly the writer that Eliot had once singled out because his fervently expressed but immature beliefs interfered with his poetry.Footnote ⁸⁶ But, like the chorus of aunts and uncles in The Family Reunion, these characters are just a little bit more honest or open with themselves and thus with each other, “mak[ing] the best of a bad job.”Footnote ⁸⁷ We might say the same of Eliot’s approach to his original. If translation of Greek is destined to remain a “bad job,” as Eliot had claimed already in 1916, then such ever more subtle soundings of Greek texts – of what can be heard in them from a distance, despite or even because of the obscurities of their language – may still be useful in laying down a common modern path.

Elektric Evasions

Sophocles’ Elektra is a play of mourning; its central character, Agamemnon’s daughter, spends most of it lamenting his violent death, deploring her fate, and plotting revenge. Elektra cannot let go of the memory of her father’s murder, obsessively recalling the details of its circumstances and leading the chorus to do so as well. Unlike the protagonists of the plays that Pound had “mistrusted” in 1916 – Persians and Prometheus – Elektra is only too eager to follow ghostly paternal commands. Every character instructs her at some point in the play to stop speaking, and most also accuse her of insanity, which likely resonated for the poet shut away in St. Elizabeths. Elektra views her own “yammering” (Pound’s translation) as her only possible action while she waits for her brother Orestes to return from hiding, avenge their father’s death by killing his murderers, and restore the rule of law in Mycenae. In contrast to Aeschylus’s recuperative Oresteia, Sophocles’ tragedy ends in medias res. Orestes first kills Klytemnestra offstage, her dying screams echoing those of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s play. He then leads Aegisthus into the palace to kill him in the exact place where he and Klytemnestra murdered Agamemnon. The play’s conclusion emphasizes the repetitive nature of these murders, suggesting that a new cycle of blood might be beginning.

The ground for Pound’s idiosyncratic translation of Sophocles’ play was prepared through his lifelong struggle with translating from Greek, which had resurfaced in the Pisan Cantos, but also through his “Elizabethan” translations from Confucius, which mark an important shift from his earlier approach to Chinese. While Pound had initially focused on the visual aspects of Chinese writing, he later transliterated the sounds, tones, and vowels of the ideograms into Roman characters. So Pound is attentive to every metrical and rhythmical movement of Sophocles’ Greek in a play which could be seen as exemplifying the regularity that attracted Pound and Eliot to tragedy in 1917. Despite the despair it portrays, Elektra is pulled back from incoherence because a certain metrical and formal regularity still prevails; as Anne Carson notes, even Elektra’s screams can be scanned.Footnote ⁶² In clinging to Sophocles’ Greek, Pound is motivated by this promise of a measured language of known and relatively fixed values that can be combined in infinite ways and still lead to a recognizable pattern: a language that can be unpredictable and thus “free” or alive,Footnote ⁶³ but which is underlain by a core of certainty, that of quantity; a language in which everything has its place and final measuring.

In translating Sophocles and at the same time returning to the effort of 1912 to devise a new prosody for English through Greek, there were many counterexamples to avoid: Browning’s “stilted, unsayable jargon” (LE 270), Eliot’s thematic veering away from the Greek, H.D.’s wheezes, and even his own Agamemnonic evasions. The result is, however, that in the course of his translation Pound uses different languages and linguistic registers to turn this play of familial war – waged by the daughter (Elektra) against the mother (Klytemnestra) in the name of the father (Agamemnon) – into a play of linguistic conflict. It’s as if, to quote Gilles Deleuze, “in order to write, it may perhaps be necessary for the maternal language to be odious,” but only so that a “kind of foreign language” may be opened up in it, and “language as a whole can reveal its outside.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Pound’s Elektra includes Irish, Scots, Cockney, and Black American dialects; archaic English lyricism; phrases in Latin and German; echoes from Confucius; and stage directions that allude to Noh theater and Native American war dances. Yet the strangest aspect of the translation’s insistent multivocalism – and arguably its greatest form of “evasion” – is its equally insistent bilingualism. Quite astonishingly, the poet seemingly annoyed with the excessiveness of Aeschylean language produced a text that on the surface is even more excessive: A third of the play appears twice, in its original Greek and in Pound’s English version. Most of the choral songs and some of Elektra’s monologues are left in transliterated (and capitalized) Greek; often they are also partially translated or paraphrased. The idea or ideal of translation as a straightforward economy in which one word replaces another is certainly challenged here. Considering Pound’s desire to preserve the colloquial, “real-life” quality of the Greek that had been covered over by tortuous syntax and grandiloquence in translation, as well as its insistent rhythmic pulse, Pound’s bilingual strategy may seem to be a very good solution. Yet Pound’s choruses work (or fail to work) in more complicated ways. “Sound” and “meaning” are not as neatly split up for Pound and, moreover, transliteration is also an act of translation. At the very least, it announces Pound’s paradoxical commitment both to Greek and to the avoidance of the “wrong” kind of philology: the “unnecessary” grammatical encumbering of the language with accents and breathings by the Alexandrian grammarians.Footnote ⁶⁵

The reason Pound includes so much Greek in his Elektra is structural and determined, if not demanded, by this particular play. For one, Pound probably thought that he was replicating Sophocles’ own composition strategy. F. R. Earp, in a book much admired by Pound titled The Style of Sophocles, traces the development of the tragedian’s style from complex, elaborate Aeschylean language in his early plays towards simplicity, directness, and a cultivated artlessness in the late ones. Elektra, though probably a late play, surprisingly contains a “curious mixture of elements” characteristic of Sophocles’ early and late plays both.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the dialogue these appear in different scenes: The Tutor’s false account of Orestes’ death, which Pound translates dialectally, with an Irish accent, would be an example of the early style and indeed is also an example of Pound’s own early style in translating tragedy, since it recalls the “evasions” used in the Agamemnon opening. But in the lyrics, claims Earp, the two styles are “present at once” (157). In replicating Sophocles’ mixture of styles, however, Pound intensifies it: On the one hand, he uses jarringly colloquial English that goes against our expectations of “dignity” for Greek tragedy (with lines like “Sez he will an’ he don’t” [line 369], “Slobber over ’em” [455], “you’re blotto delirious” [979]), and on the other, by putting in the place of the “archaic” not only English archaisms – of which there are plenty – but a most unfamiliar incantatory Greek.

Pound thus translates Sophocles’ doubleness doubly himself, as his language obsessively memorializes two kinds of past (that of English, and that of its original, Greek), in addition to recording its present. Earp interprets the tragedian’s archaisms as a distancing strategy: as the poet’s desire to remind his audience not to judge the play’s championing of matricide by the Athenian “code of morals,” since it takes place in the Homeric age (158). Given that Pound’s express intention is to make Greek and Greek tragedy “live” again, he actually reverses what Earp reads as Sophocles’ distancing gesture and uses the conflicting idioms to bring the two (or three) times together and show the bearing of one on the other(s). Pound had written to Katue Kitasono in 1940 that “[English] has taken in lashin’s of Greek, swallowed mediaeval French, while keeping its Anglo-Saxon basis. It then petrified in the tight little island”; he now seems intent on reversing this petrification and proving that indeed living language is “throughout all history and despite all academies” “inclusive and not exclusive” (L 347). Pound turns Elektra’s inability, or refusal, to forget into a prominent structural/stylistic feature of the play in its entirety. He thus interprets – and repeats – Sophocles’ own decision to use this mixed style as an inability, a refusal of his language to forget Aeschylus, epic, and his own earlier mode of writing. Ideally, the play will reveal itself to be like the urn with Orestes’ supposed ashes: thought to contain the dead (languages) but actually proving to be very much alive.

Rather than incorporate Sophocles’ text into his translation solely out of a sense of resignation, Pound allows it to interact with or even amplify his English, whether or not he can or does translate it. The Greek may function as the never-to-be-approached ideal of sonic and rhythmic perfection, but Pound also consciously uses it as a tool for writing in English, rather than in separation from it. At the same time, the Greek serves as an important measure and testing ground for English, allowing Pound to pursue sometimes barely perceptible phonological inquiries that test out his language against the Greek – inquiries necessary for Pound at the time, when faced, on the one hand, with that spoken American English for the first time in decades, and on the other, with the collapse (and need for revival) of his poetic project. His specific struggles and the choices he makes in his translation thus often tell us more about the nature of English and “English reality” than about Greek. Just as he did with the fragments of the Agamemnon in the Pisan Cantos, Pound dissects Sophocles’ Greek, first to determine what it is made of sonically and metrically (and to measure English against it), and second, to uncover what it does not explicitly say and on which its value depends for Pound: the dead king’s ghostly but palpable presence. The Elektra thus continues the Pisan Cantos’ poetic-political ambitions.

Measuring Mourning

Elektra opens with Orestes, his friend Pylades, and his old tutor arriving in Mycenae and outlining their plan for revenge. When Elektra bursts onto the stage with a scream, they go into hiding. Elektra’s opening song follows, at a moment when it is customary in tragedy for the chorus to appear; in Pound’s version, we hear in it our first, unexpected burst of Greek:

We are introduced to Elektra screaming, unable to let go, holding on to the idea of her father’s dead body. Pound makes this clearer than Sophocles. While the Greek Elektra weeps for her father and recalls Agamemnon’s own narration of his death in the Odyssey, Pound, withholding the clarifying “for” and inverting the customary verb–object word order in his tenth line, conjures a weeping Agamemnon instead (“my father weeping”). He has “been with [his daughter]” all night and then, “weeping his doom,” forces a change in her song, as if emerging from her torn, bleeding chest in the same way that he spoke through the blood offered by Odysseus. From Elektra’s opening plaintive, song-like rhythm, we move to a markedly aggressive (and prosaic) tone (“Not killed abroad …”). In presenting thus Elektra’s plight, Pound makes clear how it maps onto his own: In English, Agamemnon’s emergence parallels that of Greek, as Pound cannot let go either of Agamemnon or of Sophocles’ Greek.

In general, Elektra’s exclamations, whether lexical (e.g., “PHAOS HAGNON” ‘holy light’) or not (“OO” above, or “OTOTOTOTOI” [line 1465]), are faithfully transcribed. Moreover, when Pound inserts single Greek lines into his English, they often perform a similarly expressionistic function: They declare or immediately follow the determination to continue speaking, crying, cursing, asking for justice. In this opening speech, for example, two lines of Greek (trans. “but I won’t stop lamenting”) follow Pound’s Elektra’s claim that “I wont stand it and just keep quiet” – and again we see that what this Elektra is struggling to suppress becomes at once her anger at her father’s unjust death and, literally, her Greek. Later on in the same song, Elektra twice asks the Furies to “hear me,” immediately after which Pound inserts seven lines of Greek. In the choral song which follows Elektra’s here (the parodos), Pound’s English is preceded and followed by the line “EI MOI THEMIS TAD’ AUDAN” (“if it is right for me to speak this”),Footnote ⁶⁸ translated by a very sound-conscious Pound as “if my deem is heard in dooming” (Elek, lines 147, 155–56). In a later choral song, the chorus asks that “a sound be borne under earth / to the sons of Atreus” (Elek, lines 1209–10); what materializes immediately after is the longest section of transliterated Greek in the play. The Greek is thus consistently used expressionistically to represent speech, especially mad or “primitive” speech in the form of curses or voices from underground. In a fitting analogy to the process of translation, moreover, the voice that is in these cases explicitly allowed to come forward – and that, we may assume, is otherwise repressed – is precisely a Greek voice, the voice of the original.

At the same time, the particular lines allowed to stand in Greek are also lines that would be difficult to translate if one seeks to transfer sound and meter in addition to meaning. With the exception of her opening cry, the lines that Pound leaves in Greek in Elektra’s speech above are made up exclusively of long vowels – they are called paroemiacs and represent a meter used in this form for laments.Footnote ⁶⁹ This is not accidental: The very lines in which Elektra speaks of her lament are themselves scream-like. That again would seem to explain Pound’s inclusion of them as something that English, with its reliance on, on the one hand, stress rather than length or quantity and, on the other, the alternation of stresses, cannot approximate.

At first, then, Pound’s strategy appears to be to translate the play’s choral songs into their English metrical equivalents when he can, and transcribe the Greek when he cannot – a strategy that is similar to that used in Canto 1, where for the oldest Greek meter (the dactylic hexameter), he substituted the oldest English one (Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse). He does this most obviously in what he titles “Elektra’s Keening,” Elektra’s dirge upon receiving from a disguised Orestes and Tutor the urn supposedly containing Orestes’ ashes. Elektra’s speech is in tragedy’s standard meter for dialogue, the iambic trimeter, though it contains elements usually found in choral songs. Pound translates it in a version of the Anglo-Saxon tetrameter: two hemistichs of the familiar four-beat verse, the line break marking the caesura, while the sounds that end one line often begin the next (“me / my,” “me / in my,” “Orestes / dust”):

The hemistichs sometimes alliterate and, when not, slant rhymes or assonances are present instead (for example, in the fourth line cited, “nothing” and “him”); the few longer lines are tetrameters in themselves and always have a clearly marked caesura. Some lines are marked as “spoken” because they have three stresses (“And that bitch of a mother is laughing”; 1340), and as soon as the singing begins again, we go back to the two-stress half-lines or full tetrameters (“thou the avenger, no more avenging”; 1345). Pound’s establishment of equivalence between the standard Anglo-Saxon meter and Elektra’s equally standard iambic trimeter seems ingenious. Each meter has a duple structure (a foot in the trimeter is made of two iambs) and a strong caesura; in this case, moreover, each of Sophocles’ line begins with a spondee (an acceptable substitution for the iamb but used with unexpected frequency here), and is mirrored by Pound’s tendency to begin his lines with a stress. Thirty years after the first canto, then, Pound returns to Greek mourning rituals, translating into an Anglo-Saxon base not the standard Greek epic meter but the tragic meter. Here too the meter is accompanied by archaisms – morphological and syntactical more than lexical this time, to indicate perhaps the lesser temporal distance: “would I had died then / ere stealing thee from the slaughter” (1312–13), “no hand was near thee / to soothe thy passing, / corpse unanointed” (1318–20), “dred road thou goest” (1357), “death endeth pain” (1368). Such a translation strategy, moreover, fits in with Earp’s reading of Sophocles’ mixed diction; this passage is one he highlights.

But Pound’s translation is more complex than it seems. Though there is no Greek here, he follows the particular movements of his original very closely. With its recurring voiced–voiceless d/t slant rhymes, additionally associated with th, Pound’s Keening brings to our ears the sounds of prominent words in the Greek: thanatos (and its derivatives) ‘death’ and spodos ‘ash.’ These sounds are clustered in a distich that translates Elektra’s address to the urn towards the end of her speech (Soph., El., lines 1161–63). In Greek she switches at this moment from the iambic meter to lyric anapests, again composed almost entirely of spondees. Though Pound moves the actual address to the urn further down (complete with the exclamatory Greek “Oimoi Oimoi” [1362]), he conveys the break by also using exclusively long or heavy syllables:

We cannot pronounce these double spondees in a way that reveals the “equal” quantities; in a marked departure from the regularity of Greek vowel lengths, the relative weight or stress we will assign is in this case not necessarily determined. Do we privilege internal rhyme in “thy” and “my,” the assonance between “road” and “goest,” or the alliteration of “death” and “dying” and then “dred”? Does the fact that the lines in the Keening tend to have a falling rhythm compel us to stress “thy” even if it seems a less important word than “death”? Furthermore, though the sense of a strong pure stress-based meter prevails throughout the Keening, most of Pound’s lines also scan accentually. They consist of a dactyl and a trochee (less frequently a clear spondee though almost always scannable as one) – that is, a version of the adonic line, which he had first used in his early poem “The Return.” This can be seen in the song’s opening lines cited above: “Áll that is léft me / (my) hópe was Oréstes / dúst is retúrned me / ín my hands nóthing, dúst that is áll of him [two adonics in this longer line] / flówer that wént fórth.” Pound thus dramatizes the tension between quantity, stress, and syllable-timing by creating lines that can also be scanned accentual-syllabically and by putting in long vowels only to then overshadow both with his stress-based rhythmic pattern.

Pound’s Keening contains its Greek original – the Greek sounds, a Greek meter (though not the one used by Sophocles here) – but like the urn at the center of the scene, it does so only deceptively, hiding as much as it reveals. This writing/mourning is a false move: The object of Elektra’s mourning, she will soon find out, is not in the urn but alive next to her. Similarly, the Greek, like Orestes, is not yet dead, fit only for haunting an English poem. It is no longer a matter of raising the dead, as with the first canto’s Anglo-Saxon, but of showing that they have not died, as Orestes screams at Aegisthus (“Haven’t / you / ever learned / That the / DEAD / don’t / DIE” [Elek, lines 1750–56]). That the futile Keening would appear to be the most straightforwardly “successful” and powerfully translated section of Pound’s play is thus not surprising; Pound’s translation overall is not content with “envelop[ing] its content like a royal robe with ample folds,” as Walter Benjamin puts it, but is intent on clinging to and revealing the body of its original (be it Greek or Agamemnon).Footnote ⁷⁰

Pound doesn’t use the Greek only as a token of foreignness that, appearing transcribed and untranslated, allows him to represent a primal, unassimilable force; nor does he provide it to signal its untranslatability, the impossibility of a Greek–English exchange, only to put it aside whenever the right equivalent is found.Footnote ⁷¹ Even when his English seems complete without the Greek sounds and words, as in the Keening, it still bears their hallmarks. The “clinging” I referred to is already evident in our first introduction to Elektra quoted above; there too when Pound transcribes the Greek lines composed entirely of long syllables, he does not give up on the English, as I have more extensively argued elsewhere.Footnote ⁷² Instead Pound consistently pits English multitude against Greek stability; the resounding sonic backbone of the opening song is a performance of the different ways “e(a)r” and e can be pronounced in English, of the multiple quantitative and accentual measurings that might correspond to a single Greek vowel. Tellingly, the two Greek words, with their long vowels and diphthongs, that provide the key for this song’s phonetic and phonological inquiries also condense in sonic form the play’s main opposition between Agamemnon and Aegisthus: “ANTEREIS” (set over against, opposite) is almost an anagram of “Atreides,” a frequent epithet for Agamemnon, while “AESTHOU” (felt), which follows it, is aligned already in this passage with “Aegisthus,” whose name is placed right below it a few lines afterwards. Setting English opposite Greek doesn’t only lead to disjunction, however. Pound’s version is alliterative and simultaneously alliterative with the Greek, and the visual arrangement helps us see it. In these first lines and elsewhere, Pound encourages us to bring the Greek and English together to create an aural interlinguistic whole as he incorporates the transcribed Greek line(s) into whatever metrical or rhythmical pattern he is setting up in English – here it is a stress- and quantity-based fourteener.Footnote ⁷³ That is, Pound puts Sophocles’ language to work; the Greek may be emblematic of something English couldn’t do, but it is not allowed to simply stand inactive in the midst of his text, a memorial to metrical possibilities closed off.

Pound activates the Greek not only when it is integrated into his primarily English lines, but also when Greek passages are transposed in their entirety. We see this clearly in the first stasimon, where the strophic pair is evocatively and attentively translated, as in the Keening, but the epode follows in Greek. For Sophocles’ mostly iambic meter in the strophe and antistrophe,Footnote ⁷⁴ Pound uses three-beat lines, framed by sequences of four-beat lines, that become tightened through rhyme and a more strongly iambic pattern in the antistrophe (where the Greek also “rhymes,”Footnote ⁷⁵ with lines ending in deinois [489], lochois [490], thesphatois [501]):

The song-like triple rhythm, coupled with alliterations, assonances, and rhymes, aligns these stanzas with popular song – and appropriately so, since the chorus is speaking about prophetic dreams and oracles. Moreover, Pound’s frequent double offbeats and his use of consecutive stresses that demand to be pronounced as such correspond to Sophocles’ tendency to substitute a spondee for an iamb, which makes his iambic foot a little longer than itself, essentially replacing it with a triple measure. Even his jarring last line is due to Sophocles. The three long syllables concluding Sophocles’ last line (El. 502) foreshadow the heavy use of the molossus foot in the epode that follows; Pound’s line, despite its colloquial tone, is also strictly measured, consisting almost entirely of plausibly long and stressed syllables. Moreover, just as the final word in Greek (κατασχήσει, kataschēsei) echoes the end of its corresponding line in the strophe (αἰσχίσταις, aischistais, line 486), so Pound’s “smash ’em” recalls his “again” (whereas “smash them” would weaken the echo). “Ef” for “if” is clearly an attempt to replicate the Greek εὖ (eu) ‘well’; and finally, “thet” is a reversal of the Greek τόδε (tode) ‘this.’Footnote ⁷⁶

The close alignment between Greek and English seems to break down, however, once the chorus come to the concluding portion of the stasimon. This particular epode is metrically unusual since most of its lines end gravely and forcefully with a sequence of three long syllables (a molossus), while Jebb notes extraordinarily long syllables within the lines, with one long vowel standing in for an entire trochee.Footnote ⁷⁷ Given that in theory such sequences would be hard to replicate in a language like English that needs to alternate stresses, it makes sense that Pound would provide this epode in transcribed Greek. But in Pound’s transcription this Greek stanza bears similarities to his preceding English strophic pair: The lines are of roughly equal length (which was not the case with the longer lines of the Greek strophe and antistrophe), and abound in slant rhymes, internal rhymes, and alliterations just as the English did earlier:

Instead of aiming for a replication of the vowels, as he did with the “Geoohgiah voice,” Pound makes Greek come to English without leaving its own sonic body, by putting on display sonic features that might otherwise go unnoticed given the swing of the Greek meter. We see, for example, (what in English would be) off-rhymes between “PONTISTHEIS,” “EKOIMATHE,” and “EKRIPHTHEIS,” “OIKOI” and “AIKIA,” or between “PROSTHEN” and “AIANES.” In the latter case, moreover, the similarity is entirely a product of Pound’s transcription, for in Greek the vowel is different.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the “spoken” translation of the epode that follows (Elek, lines 583–88), Pound still tries to recreate the molossi quantitatively in his English through both long/complex vowels and consonantal clusters (e.g., in “crooked horse-race”). But this regularity of length is not what we hear. If his lines are successful for our ears, it is probably because the letters of the first line’s “curse,” much like the letters of “PELOPOS” in Greek, travel through the passage in “race,” “sea,” “continued,” “Pelops,” and “earth.” Both Greek and English epode together suggest the inescapability of Pelops’ curse, which is precisely what the entire song is about. The Greek may place a demand on the English, to which it cannot correspond fully, but in this case, the English stress-based meter in Pound’s translated strophic pair both illuminates sonic patterns in the transcribed Greek thought to be unimportant metrically and appears to dictate its progress. Arguing for the interdependence of the two languages, Pound’s Elektra performs and exhibits the linguistic interaction and exchange that might precede the monolingual smoothness of any given translation, thus laying bare the very process of translating.

Just Returns

After Elektra’s Keening, the transcribed Greek almost disappears from Pound’s play. To some extent, this is inevitable: Only one choral song proper follows, and Elektra’s speeches are shorter as the play turns from words to action. But what the absence of Greek allows Pound to do is to essentially rewrite the play’s conclusion, thus replacing the undead language with the undead king. In the last stasimon, sung by the chorus as Elektra and Orestes enter the palace to kill Klytemnestra, Pound condenses two strophes into one, and despite noting in the margins “DAMN/ Rhythm a twister,” he decides to leave out the Greek. Instead, his song harks back to the Aeschylean opening and heralds Agamemnon’s (second) coming.Footnote ⁷⁹ Pound has been systematically translating the play in a way that would support such a reading. Already in the play’s first three lines he shifts the emphasis from Orestes to Agamemnon. In Greek, the Tutor addresses Orestes as “Agamemnon’s son” (Soph., El., line 2). Unsurprisingly Pound gets rid of what would have been an archaic address in English (Oh son of Agamemnon, who once led an army to Troy, etc.), but in the process he also takes the focus off Orestes qua protagonist of this play: “Well, here’s where your father landed when he / got back from the Trojan war, this is where you / wanted to come to” (Elek, lines 1–3). Moreover, instead of introducing Agamemnon at Troy, leader of the Greek army, as Sophocles does, Pound starts more ominously with the unnamed father’s return to Argos – a sure sign that Pound himself is returning to his unfinished business. He then displaces the Tutor’s redundant reference to Elektra as being Orestes’ homaimos kai kasignētē (Soph., El., line 12; “of the same blood, and sister” [my trans.]) onto Agamemnon. Feeding off of the siblings’ blood, the father’s “body” emerges as “bloody” in the translation with a line all to itself, whereas Sophocles only refers to the “father’s murder” (El., line 11): “That’s where I picked you off your dad’s / bloody body” (Elek, lines 14–15). Pound persists in preparing Agamemnon’s return in this way throughout the play, while in Sophocles it remains at most implicit. For example, in the first stasimon, he adds a line – “the greek king won’t forget you / but he’ll be comin yet” (Elek, lines 544–45, my emphasis) – where the Greek only says the former (Soph., El., line 484). Immediately afterwards he turns the Greek chorus’s recollection of Agamemnon’s murder (Soph., El., lines 484–86) into future murders to be committed with the same axe, presumably by the coming Agamemnon: “and the bloody blood be flowin’ once again” (Elek, line 548).Footnote ⁸⁰

The corollary to Pound’s exaggeration of Agamemnon’s presence in the play – his second coming – is the particular misogynistic slanting of the depiction of Klytemnestra. Pound became convinced that the play’s use of tekousa ‘mother’ had an economic shading, tying the word to tokos ‘interest’ (Elek, pp. 95–96). Thus Klytemnestra becomes “the usuress” in a draft translation (Elek, p. 27n), and the evils she has caused a synecdoche for the economic “evils” Pound spent a decade denouncing – this allows for the play to be easily slotted into the Rock-Drill section of the Cantos. Such a reading is again already signaled in the play’s first few lines. In the Tutor’s speech, the adjective polyphthoron (Soph., El., line 10; “desolated by many deaths” per Jebb’s gloss) is displaced from the “house” onto the murder itself and translated as “dirty” (Elek, line 13),Footnote ⁸¹ setting up another pattern: The Greek kakos ‘ugly, bad’ consistently becomes “dirty” and is opposed to “clean,” Pound’s customary shading for kalos ‘beautiful, good.’Footnote ⁸² As Pound’s chorus will put it when they first come onstage, “Agamemnon was tricked and murdered. / … / a dirty hand did it, maternal” (Elek, lines 151, 153; Soph., El., lines 125–26). “Dirty” in this case – and this line may well have occasioned Pound’s turn to the word in the first place – condenses two Greek words: kaka ‘evils’ in meaning and prodoton ‘betrayed’ (in reference to Agamemnon) in sound. Replacing Klytemnestra’s Aeschylean “right” hand with a “dirty” hand, and condemning and reversing this betrayal – this false giving over, this act of a traditore – is the mission of our tradutore, who is newly committed to having his “deem … heard in dooming” (Elek, line 155).Footnote ⁸³

These two strands come to a head in the scene of Klytemnestra’s murder. Sophocles clearly echoes Agamemnon’s murder in Aeschylus, both through exact verbal repetition and through sonic echoes of words not exactly repeated.

Sophocles’ Elektra, haunted by the sound of her father’s dying words that her mother doesn’t utter – namely, πληγήν ἔσω [plēgēn esō; lit., ‘wound inside’], echoes it by telling Orestes παῖσον [paison ‘hit’], and then adding, since Orestes has already struck, διπλῆν [diplēn ‘doubly, a second time’], filling in the missing letters of πληγήν. Pound also hears Agamemnon’s voice here, repeatedly noting it in his manuscripts’ margins, and does so more than Sophocles: He actually translates Agamemnon’s and not Klytemnestra’s dying cry. Sophoclean Klytemnestra’s last words are simply “once again.” It is Agamemnon whose words of doubling are also double, like Pound’s: “once again, twice struck.” With his “Twice, twice, / always twice,” Pound makes evident what the Greek only half reveals, namely Agamemnon’s presence in this scene. Adding on a third “twice,” moreover, he marks his own iteration of the words, third after Aeschylus and Sophocles, while also expressing his linguistic predicament in this play, a third of which appears twice, in both Poundian Greek and in a bifurcated (archaic and slangy) English.

This is also Pound’s third attempt – now finally successful – to resurrect if not the Agamemnon, at least Agamemnon. Immediately following the murder, Pound translates the chorus’s word pareisin ‘are present’ (Soph., El., line 1422), referring to the re-entry of Orestes and Pylades, into stage directions for Agamemnon’s ghost, “ITS hands dripping RED blood” (Elek, p. 102). As in the opening, he eliminates Orestes from the scene, mistranslating the phrase φοινία δέ χείρ / στάζει θυηλῆς Ἄρεος οὐδ’ ἔχω ψέγειν (Soph., El., lines 1422–23; Jebb: “The red hand reeks [lit. drips] with sacrifice to Ares; nor can I blame the deed”) to support this reading. From his initial rendering of “the hands / drip Mars, and the victim / blood, blood” (Elek, p. 83n) he switches to “The dead hand drips Mars / And the slain, / I can’t blame ’em.” (Elek, lines 1674–76, my emphasis). It is finally reaching, repeating, and ultimately inverting Klytemnestra’s “good job” that allows for Agamemnon’s powerful return – it is he and not Klytemnestra who can now lay claim to being the avenging spirit for the old family crimes. Such a return proves that “They live [not live again] who lie under ground” (Elek, line 1671)Footnote ⁸⁴ – but, by the same token, this could apply to the just slain Klytemnestra.

The play’s conclusion is equally ambiguous, despite its surface triumph:

Adding the light imagery and the repetition of the name, and translating hormēi – the attenuated “enterprise” in Jebb’s translation (and in Lloyd-Jones’s) – with the more literal “rush,” Pound closes the play by returning us to the heralding of the king’s arrival in the majestic beginning of the Agamemnon, its “rush of the action … continual shrieking … flash of the beacon fires” (LE 267). His stage directions specify that at this moment “the WHOLE auditorium” can see Klytemnestra’s “bier and the lifting of the cloth” (Elek, p. 103). So, out of the darkness of the murdering, unjust, dirty maternal body, or of a static, rotting mother tongue, transcribed Greek words – that, crucially, in this case can be read also as English – have finally transmitted the light of the paternal name and lineage (note that Agamemnon is identified by his patronymic), promising the continuance of its seed. Yet Klytemnestra’s bloody bier is given the same prominence that Agamemnon’s blood-dripping hand received earlier in the stage directions; with her revealed body as a potential target for his rushing “SPERM,” she takes on his role, ominously watching over her son’s actions, and ready to begin the cycle all over again.Footnote ⁸⁵ This is why Pound would later latch on to a line Elektra speaks early on in the play, deeming it its “key phrase”: “need we add cowardice to all this filth/ills” (Elek, line 401, and P&T, p. 1108n; Οὐ ταῦτα πρός κακοῖσι δειλίαν ἔχει [Soph., El., line 351]). It retains the promise – refuted by the play itself, even in Pound’s slanted translation – that the right action might finally stop this process of accretion (of evils, murders, madness, and languages).

If what Pound dramatizes in his Elektra is Agamemnon’s return and revenge on Klytemnestra, he is also, I have been suggesting, dramatizing Sophoclean Greek taking its revenge on his maternal English: Like Agamemnon, it is ever present when, given that this is a “translation,” it ought to have been erased, overcome, killed off. These two goals, however, seem to clash: Triumphantly reviving Agamemnon and thus exiting the moral murkiness of Sophocles’ play requires an at least apparent unfaithfulness to the play’s words and sounds, while adhering as closely as Pound does to words and sounds elsewhere risks losing the “rush of the action” and producing a multiplicity of languages and styles that exceeds that of Sophocles. And yet, in the end, though insisting that the “DEAD / don’t / DIE” and that the “dead” kill the treacherous living, Pound’s text paradoxically has to hide or forget its “dead,” the Greek original it otherwise flaunts, in the moments leading up to Klytemnestra’s murder – to kill it in order to prove its continuing life by injecting the translingual “SPERM” of Atreus into a renewed English tradition. What dies with Klytemnestra, then, is paradoxically the Greek itself and the linguistic openness it introduced in Pound’s text.

As the grieving daughter’s unsettling bilingualism gives way to the linguistic transparency of “SPERM,” Pound’s political-cultural ambition overwhelms and closes off his prosodic inquiries. The play’s concluding statements (the murder, the culminating vision) take place in an English that reveals not what the Greek says and how it says it but what it doesn’t – Agamemnon – thus moving to the opposite translational extreme. Perhaps what Pound’s Elektra enacts above all is this drama: the emergence of a single, authoritative and interpretive voice out of the fluid uncertainty – linguistic and thematic – that preceded it. It is this voice that seems to dominate Pound’s next, and published, translation of Sophocles’ Trachiniai, and whose success, as we will see in the next chapter, is symbolically underwritten by the expulsion of a single, telling word: πολυγλώσσου [polyglōssou] ‘many-tongued, multilingual.’ It should come as no surprise, then, that when Pound relaunched his public “Hellenist” effort in 1953, that manifesto looked quite different from the memo circulated by Fleming in 1949. Though the latter began by calling for “A revival and much greater diffusion of greek studies” and demanding “bilingual editions of Homer and the Dramatists,” it then largely concentrated on questions of prosody, devoting two paragraphs to Greek choruses, their meter and their potential musical setting.Footnote ⁸⁶ By the second version, however, circulated more broadly than the first, all the metrical/musical language has been abandoned – perhaps a sign of the acknowledgment of Elektra’s “failure.”

“I have invented nothing”

WT is for Pound the way towards a successful translation of “electricity” – a translation that would convey precisely the mutation of something dead into energy. Unlike in the multilingual jumble of Elektra, here Greek is wielded with control, setting the tone when it appears, and balanced by the Confucian values that Pound sees as underwriting the play. As in the 1910s Pound had gained control over the pull of Greek sounds by placing Greek texts in comparative contexts, so here he uses the Noh and Confucius to keep Sophocles in line and to produce a play that offers what Sarah Bernhardt did in the performance of La Sorcière. But, unlike in Lustra, now Pound doesn’t look away from the Greek text.Footnote ¹⁴ Even as he proceeds by accretion or synthesis, his conception of the Noh, and thus of his Noh-inflected tragedy, as fundamentally citational allows him to claim he has “invented nothing.”

It is to the aging F. R. Earp that Pound turns in the final stages of drafting his translation – he is presumably one of the people over 86 who knows some Greek. Earp does not play as critical a role in shaping the translation as Rudd Fleming did for the Elektra, though Pound seems to have wanted him to.Footnote ¹⁵ Still, their correspondence throughout 1953 sheds light on the seriousness with which Pound took the process of translating and, despite the appearance of “freedom,”Footnote ¹⁶ of conveying what Sophocles said. After hearing a radio performance of the play on the BBC, Earp admits to Pound on May 2, 1954, that he “hardly noticed the slang” in Pound’s version to which he had earlier vehemently objected; he explains that, “On the stage it is less startling than in the study. So in a way I feel you were right.” This assessment garners a prompt and articulate response from a gratified Pound:

Earp takes the certificate idea seriously, reporting back on July 7 that “I have now compared your translation with the Greek, not throughout, but in about half the play, in passages taken at random. I think I can give you the required guarantee that you have added nothing to Sophocles. In fact you have rather taken away, for you often omit,” but even those omissions Earp finds justified by the nature of Pound’s audience.Footnote ¹⁸ If part of Pound’s attraction to Sophocles is the clarity and nuance of his language and the way in which it manages to engage the audience “through its intrinsic blend of saying one thing and at the same time pointing to another thing it does not say”Footnote ¹⁹ – that is, its combination of Confucian “right naming” and Noh citationality – it makes sense that Pound would be so invested in replicating these features precisely in his own translation. He has “invented nothing,” much as Cocteau’s Antigone has not, in Pound’s recollection, “invented justice.” Both are re-transmitting and re-enacting something first articulated long before.

Like H.D. in her Ion, Pound of course becomes interested in conveying just a little more strongly what Sophocles doesn’t say. But beyond the larger interpretive scheme that necessitates modifications in the play à la H.D. (particularly in the choral songs), and which I will treat in full below, Pound is actually at pains in his translation to produce locally accurate readings that also make use of the Elektra sonic experiments.Footnote ²⁰ Among the typewritten and handwritten drafts of the translation, there are apparently completed versions of passages that significantly differ from those published. The direction of the changes is almost always towards expansion and towards diminishing colloquialisms. For example, the speech in which Deianeira first mentions the prophecy concerning Herakles (36 lines in Sophocles: 141–77) initially spans a maximum of 16 lines, while the final translation is about 30. Elsewhere, colloquialisms like “Nobody with guts enough to finish me off” or “He’s out of his head” become “no one to finish it off” and “The delirium’s coming back” (P&T 1101). Odd or periphrastic choices are often sonically motivated: For instance, “I can’t get at it” nicely echoes apotibatos ‘inaccessible’ (line 1030) syllabically and sonically, while “me blubbering like a flapper” (P&T 1104) is changed from the earlier “I’m snivveling like a girl” in order to replicate the consonantal and vocalic structure of the Greek words (albeit presented in different order) in hōste parthenos / bebrycha klaiōn (lines 1071–72; “moaning and weeping like a girl”).

The drafting process and its priorities can be illustrated well through the opening of Herakles’ second long speech after his entrance:

In the final version, Pound has translated previously omitted details and made the diction less colloquial:

Pound has added the specific bodily language describing Herakles’ condition, choosing “tubes” for its alliteration with “tears,” its sound then picked up in “fetters.” In Greek there is a π and then a δ alliteration in these first lines, a repetition that feeds into πέδῃ [pedēi] ‘fetter’ and πεδιάς [pedias] ‘plain,’ words which sonically link Herakles’ present “labor” with his former beatable enemies; Pound’s “spears” and “earth” may perform a similar role, as do “explain” and “plainsmen.” Clearly “gangs” and “giants,” hit upon in the earlier draft but less obtrusively used here, are meant to replicate the effect of gēgenēs / stratos Gigantōn (“earth-born army of the Giants” [trans. Lloyd-Jones]; lines 1058–59). Pound now also includes Herakles’ pleonastic accusation of Deianeira. The Greek doubly emphasizes Deianeira’s gender by, on the one hand, offering three synonyms for “woman” (γυνὴ, θῆλυς φῦσα, κοὐκ ἀνδρὸς φύσιν) and, on the other, by punningly connecting her gender and her act: θῆλυς [thēlys, woman] … καθεῖλε [katheile, slayed] (lines 1062–63). Pound attempts to convey the sound play through the repetition of al in each of the speech’s last three lines, while semantically he fills in the specifics of a woman’s and a man’s physis. The one word Pound suppresses here, as he will its cognate later on in the play’s climactic scene, is ἄγλωσσος (aglōssos, line 1060) ‘tongueless’ and by extension ‘barbarian/not Greek-speaking,’ which refers to the other lands where Herakles performed his labors. While originally he had translated it as “the savages,” in the intermediate version cited above he adds the notion of language into the description (“dumb”) only to finally tone it down with the neutral “foreigners.” It may have been a matter of sound rather than meaning, for “foreigners” maintains the sonic backbone of “fetters,” extending the effect of the Greek play on πεδ; in any case, Pound’s text admits neither the absence nor the multiplicity of language, just the cohering word.

On the whole, however, we see Pound’s investment in his non-invention; his efforts as he drafts the translation are towards Sophocles rather than away.Footnote ²² Unlike Eliot, he is not interested in what Sophocles “might have been,” proposing a new play that may yet reverberate out of the old; rather, Pound, like H.D., wants to see what is there, often with (many sets of) new eyes. Though his engagement with Sophocles’ Greek is less visible in WT than in Elektra or even in the Agamemnon “Opening,” that is no indication of its absence. It might be a lesson that Pound silently learned from H.D.’s “wheezing” palimpsests: The Greek prototype may yet have a potent shaping effect on and through the translation even if, or because, it remains under wraps.

Electrifying Herakles

Much as in Canto 1, Pound had wanted to re-center the Odyssey on its alleged oldest part, Book 11’s nekyia, so in WT he refocuses tragedy on its origin: The Trachiniai, claims Pound in his introductory note, is “nearest the original form of the God-dance” (P&T 1066).Footnote ²³ Hence his decision to turn Fenollosa’s simile (the unity of the Noh is like the unity of tragedy) into a metaphor, a Greco-Japanese ideogram of (commemorated) divine appearance, held together by both “one image” and “a single moral conviction.” As in Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” the “Unifying Image” is fire. As Pound puts it in the Cantos, the play is “shaped from φλογιζόμενον” (87/591), framed and given overarching form by two flashes of light: a pyre described in the opening chorus and the pyre on which Herakles is burned at the end. Both emblematize the intellectual pyre of what Pound called this play’s “key phrase” – “What splendour it all coheres” – since Pound insists on reading the Greek λαμπρά not as the attenuated “clearly” or “manifestly” (the choice of most translators) but through its primary meanings of “brightly,” “radiantly,” “brilliantly.”Footnote ²⁴ The phrase also succinctly encapsulates the play’s “moral conviction,” which can be translated into Confucian terms: sincerity (defined as “the precise definition of the word”) leading to coherence (“the proper man’s words must cohere to things, correspond to them (exactly) and no more fuss about it”) and filial piety (“Filial piety is shown in the rectitude and precision wherewith one executes the will and completes the work of one’s forebears”; P&T 615, 712, 645). Herakles thus emerges as the “unwobbling pivot”: “the man of breed, in whom speaks the voice of his forebears, harmonizes these energies with no loss of his own direction; he stands firm in the middle of what whirls without leaning on anything either to one side or the other” (P&T 638). That is why Confucius appears on the title page, as it were, in the play’s first publication in the Hudson Review: A footnote to “Sophokles,” the text’s very first word, lists the Greek playwright’s dates together with those of the Chinese sage, suggesting that the latter is the play’s other father (487).

The imagistic and moral unity, as well as the play’s Sino-Japanese filiation, are already evident in Pound’s literal rectification of names in the character list. Deianeira becomes “The Day’s Air” aka “Daysair,” Herakles the “Solar vitality,” while Iole, Herakles’ mistress, is “Tomorrow.” On the one hand, the elevation of the characters into allegorical embodiments of natural forces brings the play close to the Noh and telegraphs its plot: As the day’s air slowly turns into the night’s air, so the solar vitality is perceived as decreasing, though it is known to be ever present to a transglobal eye. On the other, these names correct, or at least reorient, the Greek. Herakles no longer has to bear the kleos (glory) of Hera, his enemy, and Deianeira – whose name means “killer-of-men” – is already absolved of that burden. Since, too, in Pound’s reading she doesn’t kill deified Herakles, her name would actually be inaccurate. Moreover, unlike the solar vitality which by its essence grasps “Tomorrow,” the day’s air is transient, just as Daysair in the play cannot accurately read the future.

Thus, Greek and English may stand with feet together in the Trachinian songs, but the Greek “feet” that make it through do so already interpreted, transformed, cohering to the play’s message of theophany. All other celebrated gods (Zeus, Apollo, Artemis, Zagreus, Aphrodite – a true pantheon) serve as a prelude to Herakles, whose arrival is repeatedly wished for, imagined, heralded, and, in the end, lamented. Instead of being repeated and analyzed as in Elektra, Greek sounds are used to enable or justify the verbal and theatrical manifestation of the divine, melopoeia both directing and serving phanopoeia. WT’s first choral song makes this clear. Though Noh spirits and gods always appear at night, Pound writes over both this Noh custom and Sophocles’ actual text in order to assert the possibility of divine appearance in the light:

In Pound, it is the sun/PhoebusFootnote ²⁵ who slays the night; in Sophocles, it is the night that gives birth to the flaming (φλογιζόμενον, phlogizomenon) sun and then lulls him to sleep. Tiktei ‘gives birth’ (line 95) is a verb Pound intentionally avoids, as he does throughout Elektra, since it is the origin of tokos ‘(financial) interest.’ Pound instead transforms the sun into a divine warrior, taking his cue from the passive participle ἐναριζομένα (enarizomena), which in Greek characterizes the night as a slain foe, stripped of her arms (line 94). The sun’s brightness is metaphorical as well as literal; Pound describes him not as having the best sight (κρατιστεὐων κατ’ ὄμμα [line 101]), but as scrutinizing, keen, sharp. By presenting Phoebus as being on the attack, ready to come and strip the night of her “star-shimmer” (almost an anagram of ἐναριζομένα), Pound adds a temporal element and a sense of urgency to a Greek choral song that seems to merely state universal facts; this is also why later in the song he introduces the figure of “King Chronos,” in an intentional misreading of the Greek “Kronides” signifying Zeus. In this way he forcefully sets into motion his reading of the play, suggesting that a process is about to begin. It will end when Herakles essentially becomes Phoebus, when he comes to visibly embody the solar vitality that is here associated with Apollo.

Because Pound wants to inscribe in this first “flash” the future development of the Heraklean image, he also gives up on the triply brilliant phrase ὦ λαμπρᾷ στεροπᾷ φλεγέθων (line 99) addressed to the sun, in order to bring in another god: Zeus, who is symbolized by the “lightning blaze” and whose name sonically resonates in these lines’ prominent z sounds. He is the father whom “Alkmene’s son” will also eventually come to resemble. Had Pound translated the Greek half-line as “shining/blazing with the bright flash (of lightning)” (my trans., based on Jebb), the image would have clearly been that of the sun. Had he translated λαμπρᾷ as “splendid,” he would have created an internal subject rhyme with the play’s triumphant final image, but he would not have set up a correspondence between Herakles and Zeus; he would not have given us a lens through which to view that final image – namely that of paternal care. Herakles’ development is figured also through the two pyres in this stanza. Though in Greek both images of fire refer to the sun, in Pound we move from the pyre on which the body of the vanquished night is burned (“her blazing pyre”) to the intellectual – because tied to knowledge – lightning pyre of the all-seeing sun. The question raised – whether there might be a place, a “slit” (not there in Sophocles) that cannot be seen by sun, something that the detecting intellect cannot read – is exactly that which the play’s climax will answer in the negative.

Pound differentiates his Herakles from Eliot’s already at this early moment in the play. Though “the man who dies” cannot expect “unvaried happiness,” Pound’s chorus asks Daysair not to “choose despair” (P&T 1070–71).Footnote ²⁶ The phrase inevitably brings “Little Gidding” to mind, as if Pound is about to provide an alternative to Eliot’s proposal for the abandonment of despair. Indeed, he does not translate two lines that would more explicitly connect his play to Eliot, and Sophocles to the later traditions of Seneca and Chapman that Eliot is so interested in: “Sorrow and joy come round to all, as the Bear moves in his circling paths” (lines 129–30). Instead, to the endless churning of time, he retorts not with the Eliotic divine love but with the “daysair,” the embrace of the impermanent – “Be swift to enjoy, what thou art swift to lose” (P&T 1070) – before returning to the discerning paternity of Zeus, now tied to language: “Hath Zeus no eye (who saith it?) / watching his progeny?” (P&T 1071).Footnote ²⁷ Reassurance or providence is not based on love, but on securing a chain of linguistic transmission.

When the messenger first announces Herakles’ impending return, the dominant images from this first choral song resurface: “You’ll soon see him, the man you want, / crowned with Victory. He’s looking splendid” (P&T 1072). Pound pleonastically adds to the messenger’s last sentence, over-translating the Greek phanenta ‘appearing,’ and thus continuing to develop the ideogram of the (intellectually) bright and burning warrior meant to be looked at.Footnote ²⁸ Daysair asks the chorus to “[t]une up,” and what Jebb calls a “‘lively dance-song’” (p. 34) begins. Pound’s own tune is set to two Greek words, “Analolu” and “EUPHARETRON” (‘with beautiful quiver’); they replicate the sonic key of the Sophoclean text, while their l and r are additionally echoed in Apollo and Artemis, the gods at the center of the song, and may even suggest Herakles.

Though Apollo and Artemis are the addressees of this paean (as gods associated with the sun and the moon respectively), they are only named once in the Greek; Apollo’s sun-god qualities are, moreover, not mentioned. In Pound, however, the chorus begin with an adulation of Phoebus-turned-Apollo in his sun-brightness, seemingly continuing their previous song. Pound is also marking time: Apollo has now come, the time of “ere” has passed, and “light” not only supplements but also corrects “night” at song’s end.

The song evokes several Poundian contexts. Formally, this is the most striking and unusual of Pound’s choruses, since it is spaced out like a canto, perhaps prompted by Jebb’s assessment that the verses were distributed between different singers/semichoruses. The Greek words intervene, but again as they do in the Cantos rather than in Elektra. Canto 4 in particular provides a guide for reading this song. The first canto to be completed, it was also the first canto to cohere, to produce an “image” through the newly discovered ideogrammatic method, or, as the canto puts it, the method of “ply over ply” (4/15).Footnote ²⁹ As the chorus tunes itself up and expresses Daysair’s (fleeting) joy, so Pound revives and commemorates his own “joy”; he brings in a snapshot of what he too had expected to come, splendid. The cohering image in Canto 4 is, fittingly for this play, metamorphosis: the liminal moment of dawning, of things or cities coming into being – metamorphosis, built out of the themes of cannibalism and love intertwined. The canto’s mode is repetition, reflected on every level: semantically, in each myth of cannibalism it presents; intertextually, as the Ovidian tale of Diana and Acteon turns into an event in a troubadour vida; and formally, as the poem is recursive in almost every line, including one whose themes are echoed here: “Bathing the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana, / Nymphs, white-gathered about her, and the air, air, / Shaking, air alight with the goddess” (4/14).

The specific repetitions in this song take us further back. First, the incantatory invocation of the divine names evokes the litany of names in the pre-imagist poem “The Alchemist” (1912). Subtitled “Chant for the Transmutation of Metals,” the poem conjures a series of mythical and literary female figures “Out of Erebus” who will help the poet transform the base material of words into the gold standard of poetry (P&T 566). As its two refrains – “Remember this fire” and “Quiet this metal” – tell us, the transmutation involves first recording or remembering one’s engagement with the past while burning (through) it, and then silencing its voice. So here the poet-translator, writing in his signature form, purges through fire both his received English idiom and “the external original” of Sophocles even as he reproduces it. Second, the mysteriously reverberating “analolu” recalls the exorcism we find in the Noh play Awoi No Uye, where the embodied evil spirit of a wife’s jealousy is vanquished by the recitation of incomprehensible “scripture.” Indeed, Pound may be undertaking some lexical exorcism of his own. “Analolu” is a variation of the word with which the Greek song begins: ἀνολολυξάτω (anololyxatō, line 205). Pound does not translate it, partly because he performs what it means: crying aloud with joy. But the word resonates in Pound’s Greek work. In the opening of Agamemnon its nominal form ὀλολυγμός designates the messenger’s cry upon seeing the chain of lights that announces Agamemnon’s imminent return (line 27); Pound, keeping the sound, had translated it as “hullabaloo” (“Opening,” 119). In Elektra the verb is unusually deployed in the Tutor’s false account of Orestes’ death in a chariot race; rather than expressing joy in a ritual context, it describes the crowd’s “cry of pity” in response to Orestes’ fall (line 750; per Jebb). In Pound’s Greek reading, then, ἀνολολύζω seems to be the deceptive word par excellence: expressing joy when tragedy will follow the hero’s return in Agamemnon, and horror at the hero’s fake non-return in Elektra. In his rendering of the Trachinian song, however, the word is transparent. It does what it says: heralds the god who will actually appear and who, despite appearances, will neither betray nor be betrayed.

It is a similar hope that “the proper man’s words” will “cohere to things, correspond to them (exactly) and no more fuss about it” (P&T 712), that brings Zagreus into the picture. Quite significantly in the context of this choral song but also of Canto 4, Zagreus was the son of Zeus by Persephone. He was slain and dismembered by the Titans, but his immortal heart survived and he was eventually reborn as Iacchus/Dionysus. Though the word βακχίαν (bakchian) ‘bacchic’ appears here (Soph., Trach., line 219), and Pound translates it by “Bacchanal,” Zagreus is not mentioned. At the end of the song, however, we have the lines: ἰὼ ἰὼ Παιάν· / ἴδ’, ὦ φίλα γύναι. / τάδ’ ἀντίπρῳρα δή σοι / βλέπειν πάρεστ’ ἐναργῆ, “Oh, oh, Paean! See, dear lady, see! Behold, these tidings are taking shape before thy gaze” (ibid., 220–23; trans. Jebb, modified). If we read as though we were listening to music – per Fenollosa’s instructions for the Noh (P&T 336) – Pound’s “io” is presumably the exclamation ἰὼ, and his “Zagreus” must be the Greek ἐναργῆ (enargē) ‘visible, palpable, in bodily form.’ What assumes bodily form in Pound is the very sound of the word; the repeated invocations, then, are intended to bring about the transmutation of word into god. Indeed, we could even punningly read “Io” as the Italian “I,” the god asserting his presence. The presence of “Zagreus” here forges a link between this translation, the Noh God-dance, the first successful canto (with further echoes of Canto 17, where, after the Hell Cantos, Zagreus again emerges out of sound), and the myth of Osiris, whose limbs or luminous details Pound was gathering forty years before. The hope is that out of dismemberment may come regeneration, coherence – not in the form of Bacchus in the case of this play, but through another son of Zeus. Zagreus/Herakles will appear and say “Io” not at night, as with the Noh gods, but in the light, and Greek tragedy will return to its origin in Dionysian dance.

After Apollo, Zeus, and Zagreus, the fourth divine manifestation produced by the transmutation of Greek sound is a proper dea ex machina. After Hyllos has described Herakles’ suffering upon putting on the poisoned robe, Pound’s chorus accuses Aphrodite of standing by while “bright Herakles in his shining” took a new bride: “Attest / That / Kypris stood by and never said a word, / Who now flares here the contriver / manifest … / and indifferent” (P&T 1096). Here Pound picks up on the Greek alliteration of φ and replicates it.Footnote ³⁰ By additionally emphasizing Sophocles’ pleonasm of φανερά–ἐφάνη (phanera–ephanē, visibly–made visible) in “flares” and “manifest,” he again links fire with divine appearance and thus casts in new light the chorus’s earlier characterization of Herakles; only in Pound is he said to be “bright” and “burn[ing] out” (P&T 1096). At this moment, Pound’s stage directions instruct,

The theatrical convention of the deus ex machina was introduced by Euripides, to show the end of the “organic relationship” between gods and humans.Footnote ³¹ Pound, on the contrary, inserts Aphrodite here (as Kypris, a local deity) to suggest both the possibility of transition from the divine to the human world and the magical power of names – note that her appearance is occasioned by an act of “attestation.” To paraphrase Spirit of Romance, by naming over the most beautiful thing (Aphrodite), the chorus has brought to earth a vestige of the heavenly splendor.

As Herakles’ appearance nears, Pound brazenly manipulates the variables of sound and vision, obscuring one god while hinting at another, in order to prepare for his play’s climactic moment. When the fourth stasimon announces the hero’s arrival yet again, the emphasis is on his suffering, which is paradoxically “said” to be an “unspeakable wonder.”Footnote ³² Pound corrects this inconsistency, removing the other voices and calling Herakles a “splendour of ruin” (P&T 1100) – the phrase is a montaged sonic X-ray of λέῩουσιν (legousin, they say) and ἄσπετον (aspeton, unspeakable). Eliding the actual presence in the line of the Greek thauma ‘wonder’ (etymologically linked to vocabularies of seeing), he once again converts concrete Greek sounds into luminous vision and, in this case, the unspeakable into a splendor that will soon be spoken. When he finally appears, already “in the mask of divine agony” (P&T 1101) – an indication to the Noh initiate that he is a god, since in Noh the god always wears a maskFootnote ³³ – Herakles invokes Zeus’s altar and echoes the Noh:

In Sophocles there is a new thauma here (line 1003), which Pound leaves untranslated. The Greek Herakles claims that the coming of Zeus would be wondrous, but Pound, not wanting to associate thauma or splendor with Zeus, completely trivializes it in the last line cited above, just as he had done earlier when the key word lampra ‘brightly’ referred to Iole.Footnote ³⁴ The possible connection between the words’ recurrences in Sophocles is not a current that he lets pass through. Moreover, while in Greek the address is eventually aimed at Zeus, who is named, this Herakles snipes at the vague and almost rote “God a’mighty”; that is, both praise and blame of the divine father are toned down. Pound also does not make it clear that Kanea should indicate Zeus; the repetition of “holy” suggests a holiness of place (or place spirit) separate from that of the altar. Though the place-name has reappeared in other adjectival variants in connection with the altar of Zeus, Pound, following the Greek suffix changes, had spelled it “Kaenean” (P&T 1074) and “Kenaion” (P&T 1092). In these variations he at least preserves the quality of the Greek η in Κήναιον; in “Kanea,” however, the e/ae becomes an a perhaps in order to echo the name of the Japanese goddess Kwannon/Kuanon, frequently referred to in the Cantos. In the Noh play Tamura Kwannon permits the appearance of Tamura in his true guise after the “dron[ing] … over” of Scripture (P&T 381). Here, then, this goddess of ghostly returns replaces and takes the blame for the Zeus who does not right the wrong that neither poet nor chiropractorFootnote ³⁵ could fix. Herakles is left to achieve his speakable “splendour” alone because, for Pound, wondrous sight involves erring; one is not given a complete text to read from the start, but from “ruin” has to make the fragments cohere.

As occurs in the Noh spirit dances, the past needs to be summed up, re-enacted for the unsuspecting wandering priest, who will from that point on remember and continue to tell the story. So Herakles asks Hyllos to “Listen first” – and by listening properly, to “show what you’re made of, / my stock” – as he retells and finally comprehends the two prophecies (P&T 1107). The first, which “my father told me long ago,” was that someone dead would kill Herakles: that is, the centaur Nessus (P&T 1107). The second was “breathed out at the Selloi’s oak” in the sanctuary of Dodona, where Herakles “heard it and wrote it down / under my Father’s tree”; it predicted his release from “trouble” – that is, he now realizes, his death (P&T 1108).

There is a contrast at the end of Sophocles’ play between “an audience’s traditional knowledge of Heracles’ apotheosis and the lack of an explicit pointer in the play to this compensation.”Footnote ³⁶ This is what Pound sets out to correct through the Noh, by building the play around an image. Unlike Sarah Bernhardt in La Sorcière, whose Noh-like transformation onstage from old woman to young Pound had admired in the early 1900s and recalled in the 1910s, Herakles cannot take off his (poisoned) cloak. But he trades the deadly adherence of the cloak to his body for the coherence and rejuvenation of his mind; he takes off his mask of agony to reveal, like Bernhardt, a revived, golden image, “an image” that Pound might hope would be “as durable as that of any piece of sculpture that I have seen” (L/JJ 53).Footnote ³⁷ The typographically distinct key phrase, its long/heavy syllables corresponding to those in Greek, functions as the caption of the image whose description follows; its sonic coherence both shows Pound’s own filial obedience to father Sophocles and supplements the image just as the cadence of Bernhardt’s alexandrines had, “stir[ring] up an emotion in the audience … the source of which [in this case, the accord between Greek and English prosody] they will be unable to determine” (L/JJ 53). At last the electrical circuit has been set right, and electrified Herakles can now receive messages from the “air” and transmit them; to paraphrase 1915’s “Affirmations,” he starts up his own machinery, withstands the highest voltage, and records, with reserve, precision, and harshness, the currents that are passing through him (SP 376). Droning over the scripture turns what might have been ἄσπετον ‘unspeakable’ into audiovisual splendor – and Elektra’s capitalized, only partially digested Greek into a capitalized English translation – just like the one outlined in that 1915–16 essay on Joyce and the modern stage, and reveals not the altar we see in Greek tragedies, but the god dancing alone. “Intellectual vision,” Pound had written to Dorothy Shakespear some forty years before, is the “surest cure for ghosts” (L/DS 276) – the ghosts of the Noh and tragedy, and of history – and allows the haunted poet to return to the writing of his magnum opus.

So, the “body of light” has indeed “come forth / from the body of fire,” as Pound puts it in Canto 91 (630). The “make it new” ideogram precedes the Trachinian key phrase (lampra symbainei) when it first appears in Canto 87/591, in order to emphasize that this is not a return like the one in Tamura or in Pound’s Elektra, where we see Agamemnon’s bloody hand appear, ready to kill Klytemnestra. Herakles is not a ghost; he is exposed in this guise for the first time. He emerges out of the dark pangs of divine agony (during which he blindly accused everyone for his misfortune, though Pound has cut some of his complaints), through the binding memory of both the Father’s speech (“My father told me”) and the Father’s tree whose “scripture” he drones over (and which allows him to “quiet this metal,” and then shed the negative mask), and into something new, solar serenity, understood not only as peacefulness but also in its etymological sense of clarity, transparency. Canto 100 provides a gloss and links this moment to Dante’s Paradiso: “Lume non è, se non dal sereno [there is no light, if not from the serene; my trans.] / stone to stone, as a river descending / the sound a gemmed light” (100/736; Paradiso 19.64). Sound turns into light, Elektra into Herakles, as the poison (“veleno”) of the flesh is left behind for the sake of living Justice (“giustizia viva”) – as Dante puts it in the lines following the one quoted (19.66, 68). Having clarified his beliefs in WT, Pound readies himself for the return to his own writing of the paradiso, as he had told Eliot almost fifteen years before.

If flaming Herakles provides the image around which the Noh facet of this play is built, the obedience to paternal law would be the “single moral conviction” that unifies its Greek elements. Remembering the paternal legacy, purged through the fire of error sent by the father/Master of the Soul in order to find his own language (to paraphrase 1908’s “Histrion”), the “God’s son”Footnote ³⁸ is alchemically transformed and revealed to be a divine father himself. Coherence of past and present is not enough; someone must “copy this palimpsest” and carry the message registered into the future (Cantos 96/817).Footnote ³⁹ So, as Zeus has proved that he is Herakles’ father through the fulfillment of his prophecies, Hyllos must prove that he is his son, that the paternal lineage will continue. Even before realizing the paternal law, Herakles had asked Hyllos to “start showing whose son you are. I.e. mine,” by renouncing his mother and – in an echo of Pound’s rhetoric around Klytemnestra – getting “that producer out of her house” (P&T 1103–04). After the key phrase, Herakles enjoins him to carry the weight of his name and resolve the family crisis by marrying the substitute mother Iole and killing the father: “And put me onto the pyre / … Show that you are my son” (1109). These are his “orders,” and Hyllos has to “Do ’em, / or change your name” (1110).

Pound himself seems intent on performing his filial duties. The key phrase is supplemented by a footnote, another caption for its image, which suggests that “thus was not it,” and that there is “a whole other set of acts” to consider. It is there that we find the “orders” that Pound is trying to enact:

Pound traces a transnational lineage for this translation – the intellectual paternity of Cocteau (actually Pound) as reviver of Greek tragedy, the error of Elektra’s incoherent mourning and excess of ills – and concludes with an impersonal voice, as impersonal as that of the divine Herakles. But the voice does allegedly belong to Mussolini, who is supposed to have written this statement in reference to his ouster from office in a 1944 memoir. “What has been, should have” is how Pound translates it in Canto 87, right after the lines: “Δηάνειρα, λαμπρὰ συμβαίνει / From the dawn blaze to sunset” (591–92). No longer grieving for the father, Pound burns him in and through WT and moves on with his law.

Some Other Tongues: Daysair

In a draft for “How to Read,” while Pound is testing out formulations for his poetic categories of phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia, we find a question that disappears from the published version:

In many ways, Pound’s whole body of work is about “seeing via” – and, as I have been arguing, the fact that WT allows him to bring together so many parallel fields of interest, is the reason why he esteemed it so highly, and why it catalyzed his return to the Cantos. The long “poem” which coheres in and as the perfectly constructed image, the Noh fantasy that has been with Pound for forty years, the legitimation of the ghostly fathers that haunt him more than ever after the war, step together – συμ-βαίνουν – in this luminous detail of the Trachiniai that also happens to be actually incandescent. The image of Herakles’ electrified and convulsing body that is simultaneously dead and alive, citational (recalling Mussolini, Gaudier-Brzeska,Footnote ⁴¹ Zeus, Agamemnon, the poet himself) and uniquely present on a theatrical stage, functions then also as the most “faithful” image of Ezra Pound’s body of work. But in the process of forging such correlations and discerning the common denominator – which appears as the word or the image “beyond formulated language” in the complex audiovisual ideogram of Herakles – some languages go unheeded, as we have already begun to see. For the sake of the totalized image – Herakles no longer in his “mask of agony,” but in that of “solar serenity” – a crucial word designating the paternal tree has to remain untranslated: πολυγλώσσου (polyglōssou), many-tongued, multilingual (line 1168).

As with many other elements in WT’s climax, a slight change in the reading of the Greek earlier in the play prepares for this. In narrating his father’s actions after sacking Iole’s native city, Pound’s Hyllos says that “He orientated the altars, to the gods, our own. / Fixed the lay-out, cutting the leaves” (P&T 1092). As Earp tells Pound, “There is nothing about cutting grass here.”Footnote ⁴² Both Jebb’s and Storr’s versions indicate the same: for example “he marked the bounds / Of altars and a sacred grove to Zeus, / His father” (trans. Storr, Trach. 753–54). Pound’s translation is again uncharacteristically pleonastic. The Greek Herakles horizei ‘defines’ or ‘delimits,’ but the Confucian–imagist one must be more precise: He has to find the right orientation, decide on the structure, and cut what is superfluous – a foreshadowing that the many speaking leaves of Zeus’s oak at Dodona will be silenced by the translator later on.

In an early, undated typescript πολυγλώσσου is actually translated, but it is then left out of the setting copy:Footnote ⁴³

At this stage of composition, Pound has not yet come upon his translation for λαμπρὰ συμβαίνει, trying out various versions, the final of which is: “what splendour, my boy / Dont [sic] you see how it all works out.” In the rough drafts of the typed manuscript,Footnote ⁴⁴ Pound leaves a blank before “oak tree,” as well as after (wrote it) “down.” It is not clear if the blanks are for words he has not yet translated or just pauses. Pound writes and crosses out various translations for “tree,” adding and deleting other words in the speech as well, but πολυγλώσσου is conspicuously absent. Though he initially translates it, then, Pound does not admit this word into his text after he has hit upon the translation of Herakles’ dying cry, as if it is this multiplicity of tongues that threatens coherence.Footnote ⁴⁵ The word resurfaces in Canto 95/664, both in Greek and in Pound’s translation – obviously he did not think it unimportant – in a moment when he seeks to circumscribe the meaning of polis, and which I will further discuss below. The other tongues in the Trachiniai that Pound erased or corrected to form his Heraklean image offer alternative, more ambiguous “unifying images” that may come closer to those of the Noh but are less easily tied to “moral convictions.”

That an oracle came true would have been no surprise for Sophocles’ audience; what Pound emphasizes to such a degree is not especially marked in the original.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Poundian Herakles’ intense intellectual light is nonetheless justified by the many sounds or voices vanquished by it; the play until this moment has been full of rumors, false evidence, misreadings, tellings and retellings. While Herakles’ (and Pound’s play’s) imagistic coherence relies on meaningfully recalling and re-citing only well-defined right facts or the right names – much as only select Greek words make it into the translation – Daysair’s interactions and scenes are filled with uncertainties and unverified logoi, their ambiguity highlighted by their frequent formal construction as binary statements, especially in Pound’s version. For example, Daysair speculates “That [Herakles]’s sitting around / somewhere or other,” to which Hyllos responds with one of his characteristic hedges: “they say he’s in Euboea, / besieging Eurytusville / or on the way to it” (P&T 1068–69). Then, the messenger Likhas offers a “double account” of the quarrels that have delayed Herakles’ arrival, a rearrangement of the Greek narrative that is otherwise inexplicable.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, Pound’s Likhas repeatedly emphasizes that his story reflects “what he [= Herakles] says” (P&T 1075). A second, unnamed Messenger later says of Likhas, with respect to a different inaccuracy, that “That fellow was lying, one time or the other, / one heck of a messenger!” while of course it is now he who bears the title and is not delivering a firm message (P&T 1078). When Daysair asks the lying Likhas to “remember a messenger’s first job is / to do what he’s told, not more, not less, / but just what he is told,” he responds equivocally, “Properly trained in Hermes’ messenger-service” (P&T 1087–88). We recall that in the parodos even Zeus’s providence was tied to rumor (“Who said it?”), and that rumor (λέγουσιν ‘they say’) was suppressed to produce the “splendour” of Herakles. It is ambiguities such as these that Herakles’/Pound’s clear messaging aims to eradicate.

The unwitting source of the play’s major misreadings is Daysair. From the very first line the play hints at the uncertain ground on which it stands, for it opens not with the Phoebus-dawn chorus but with Daysair quoting: “‘No man knows his luck ‘til he’s dead.’ / They’ve been saying that for a long time” (P&T 1067). Tradition seems disproved; she (wrongly) closes her ears.Footnote ⁴⁸ What she does not know is revealed – to us, but not to her – in another piece of received wisdom she recalls in Pound’s version: “‘Don’t get sun-burnt.’ / ‘Don’t get wet in the rain. Keep out of draughts,’ / that’s a girl’s life till she’s married” (P&T 1071). Sophocles says exactly the opposite – namely that in youth one doesn’t care about such things – and, unlike in the earlier passage, we do not get the sense of, or even a reference to, other voices or logoi. Pound intentionally translates the Greek theou ‘of the god’ (Soph., Trach., line 145) as “sun,” not only to once again suggest that Herakles is a god or even God, but also to unite the three natural elements in a synthetic vision: the sun that Daysair eventually will get metaphorically burned by, the water she was saved from by Herakles (namely the river Akheloös, whom Pound has elevated to a character in the play though he does not appear), and the draught (air) that she is. The future, the past, and the present are thus also united in this memory of past speech, but Daysair disqualifies it all, unable to see its relevance to her predicament.

In Sotoba Komachi the ghost of Komachi appears as an old woman, symbolized and doubled by the sotoba, the stump on which she sits; that sotoba is for Pound the play’s unifying image. Though she was a “bright flower,” Komachi is now a “ruin”; similarly, though the sotoba used to be a “carved wooden devotional stick, or shrine,” it no longer has letters on it that would betray its holy function (P&T 345–46). Daysair too finds herself with an unreadable stump, an “old slab of wood with sign writing on it” that Herakles left behind (P&T 1071). Their lovers are the reason for both women’s troubles: Shosho’s resistance to Buddhism kept him and Komachi apart, so now his ghost haunts her, “driving me on with the madness,” while Daysair will be driven to extreme actions because of Herakles’ neglect of his marital vows (P&T 346). In Kayoi Komachi, the play that follows Sotoba, the lovers are reconciled, Shosho dropping his anti-Buddhist “idée fixe”; like Herakles in his climactic moment, he appears “in a garment with many folds” and “a light shows in his spirit” (P&T 349, 353). The transformation is facilitated by a waki; by merely naming the ghosts of the separated lovers, this wandering priest challenges them to reproduce a condensed image of their story in the form of a dance, as if to prove that their names are right (P&T 351). So in WT, for Herakles to drop his idée fixe – namely, that he is a victim of Daysair’s murderous jealousy – a story has to be repeated and righted, and that story was originally told by Daysair. She first provides the account of unenlightened Herakles, perhaps further distorted through her own telling, that will be rectified in his moment of enlightenment.

Daysair introduces the Dodona oracle and sets up the play as a challenge to see if it will come true. Her recollection of Herakles’ account differs significantly from his own later in the play. Daysair’s version, narrated separately to Hyllos and to the chorus, is expressed as a binary – “either he would be dead, or come back” from his last labor – whereas Herakles only records one message which he had misinterpreted and now understands correctly: “I am released from trouble. / I thought it meant life in comfort. / It doesn’t. It means that I die” (P&T 1071, 1108; see also 1069). Even her description of Dodona contradicts his: She speaks of a “beech-tree” not an oak, and of the deliverers of the divine message being “a pair of doves” not the Selloi (P&T 1071).Footnote ⁴⁹ Sophocles himself connects Deianeira and Herakles’ accounts by using συμβαίνει in similar formulations (Soph., Trach., lines 173, 1174); they both say that the time has “come to pass” for the fulfillment of the prophecy. The first step taken here is to be completed later on, when Herakles puts this writing together with what “my father told me long ago” and “it all coheres” (P&T 1107). In an earlier draft, Pound had tried to keep this echo, translating “the time fits = now / truth is the foresay was,” just as Herakles says that the two prophecies “fi[t],” and that “Time lives, and it’s going on now” (P&T 1108). But in the end Pound diminishes Daysair’s insight and has her skeptically up the stakes: “Time up, / see how much truth was in it” (P&T 1071).Footnote ⁵⁰ It is as if in reference to this speech that Canto 87 tells her “Δηάνειρα, λαμπρὰ συμβαίνει,” giving her the answer: There was bright coherence in it (591).

The play’s plot – and Herakles’ eventual apotheosis – hinges on Daysair’s most fateful misreading: that of her interaction with the centaur Nessus. It is there that we find the concrete images that underlie and enable Herakles’ flaming coherence. After the string of false messages that have put into question the very task of the messenger, the chorus comments on Daysair’s decision to use the alleged love-potion given to her by Nessus, putting her again in the position of the (bad) listener:

Pound struggled with the translation of this antistrophe, coming to the final triple rhyme late in the drafting process. In the stanza’s final form, Pound has added an emphasis on telling absent in Sophocles, whose chorus refers only to the rumor that Herakles is performing sacrifices elsewhere (κλῄζεται θυτήρ). It may be prompted by the use of ἀμείψας (ameipsas), copied in its present form ἀμείβω multiple times in Pound’s draft. The participle here refers to Herakles’ “leaving” the shrine where he is sacrificing and returning to Trachis, but the verb’s primary meaning is “exchange” or “change,” often used to introduce dialogue in Homer. Thus, given too the presence of other “language” words such as klēizetai ‘said to be,’ peithous ‘persuasion,’ and prophasei ‘pretext,’Footnote ⁵² Pound feels justified in converting the song into one about exchanged words, especially because – as he tries to convey with his tight rhyming – its last three lines are densely alliterative and sonically repetitive in Greek, as if they themselves are exchanging phonemes. When Daysair realizes what she has done and emerges from the house “in the tragic mask,” she continues in the same vein:

She remembers what was not written and seemed univocal, while of course no one had paid much attention to the prophecy that was written on the oak wood and seemed (but was not) ambiguous. The word used by Deianeira in Greek for both the actual and the imaginary surface of writing is the same, delton (lines 157 and 683), though Pound obscures this imagistic echo by translating the former as “slab of wood” and the latter as “brass plate.” It is also this scene of memory and listening that Herakles’ later successful reading corrects and overwrites, replacing the unnatural beast with the divine father. The untranslated repetition of delton, however – which links the contrasting true (divine) and false (beastly) messages but which is suppressed in WT because it would reorient the play’s imagistic coherence away from Herakles and towards Deianeira – allows for the rewriting of this scene in Canto 101 as a parable for usury. There the centaur is presented as the emblem of corrupt banks and is then contrasted with the French farmer Elzéard who “has made the forest at Vergons / under Kuanon’s eye there is oak-wood” (744–45), his brass “engraving” once again overwritten by wood.Footnote ⁵³

At the same time, the “fold” identified with “told” in the choral song recalls Pound’s “ply over ply” method. The gown, woven and then unwittingly poisoned by Daysair, comes into its text-uality: It is folded in and by what was told, assuming a relation not with carefully constructed language, but with a false logos, a logos lacking sinceritas. Woven and clamped on, gnawing Herakles from the inside out, it is the gown that first kills, then saves him, and it is a fabric in some sense figured by Pound as his cantos.Footnote ⁵⁴ That is perhaps why Pound’s Hyllos calls it a “marvellous peplon,” instead of a “deadly” one (thanasimon peplon [Soph., Trach., line 758]); its splendor unfolds as one keeps looking.Footnote ⁵⁵ Sticking to Herakles’ body, the textual folds of the gown-poem become indissociable from their subject and, hopefully, are themselves transformed; the imagist “God in a vision” literally is the play.Footnote ⁵⁶ But this is only possible after “that producer” Daysair is out of the house, because in Pound she had been allowing other currents to pass through, whereas Herakles wants to cut through the fold. Tellingly, he asks Hyllos not to poikilleis palai (Soph., Trach., line 1121). Initially Pound had translated the phrase as “I’m too far gone to guess riddles,” but in the final version he elaborates on it in order to get at the specifically literary sense of poikilia as ‘variety, intricacy, ornamentation’ (LSJ ii.3): “I’m too sick to be pestered with double-talk and nuances” (P&T 1105).

Indeed, after the moment of coherence, Herakles himself is more concise and, as Pound notes, “Herc. never mentions / Days air / after that line.” Liebregts has argued that, for Pound, this is because Herakles realizes that erōs was “the driving force behind the entire chain of events,” and that both he and Daysair fell victim to his power.Footnote ⁵⁷ A close reading of the fold–told stanza, however, suggests that Herakles’ coherence is literally predicated on the absence of love. Pound replaces erotic desire with language – a process he will reverse in Canto 102 (see below). The “told” and “fold” repetitions, then transformed by Herakles into Zeus’s “law,” substitute for the Greek chorus’s emphasis on passion: the consuming passion Daysair feels and wishes Herakles would feel for her when she hopes he will arrive πανίμερος (panimeros [Soph., Trach., line 660]). Jebb comments on this word extensively, noting it can have two contradictory meanings, both “all-desiring” and “all-desired.” Pound again cuts through the linguistic fold and, as Liebregts rightly observes,Footnote ⁵⁸ opts for an alternative reading of the line altogether, translating the (now preferred) variant πανάμερος ‘all day long’ with his performatively repetitive “Day long, day long” – a phrase that additionally keeps the focus on the temporal unfolding of the play. Pound’s decision to look away from the Greek text printed in both of his main sources is all the more noteworthy because of the resonances πανίμερος would have had for him; the word is related to the Sapphic ἰμέρρω ‘I long for’ that Pound had used as a title for his version of Fragment 96 almost forty years before. Just as there he had ignored the erotic triangulation Sappho presents in favor of a more straightforward poem of longing, so here he writes over love in order to emphasize the supersession of the centaur’s false and deception-inducing act of telling by Zeus’s true one. Desire misleads, especially if women are involved; the word of the father does not.

Pound had written in 1916 that Dante’s “Paradiso” “is the most wonderful image,” but had clarified that it is not “a perseveringly imagistic performance. The permanent part is Imagisme, the rest … are philology” (GB 86). It is this kind of philology that departs with Daysair in WT, this love of logoi expressed in the proliferation of imprecise speech, rumors, and misreadings that may have obscured the image. Pound is still or again performing the purifying rituals of imagism, trying to shape up his poem and extract the voices – the tongues of the Pisan Cantos, Elektra’s Babel, Sapphic yearning, and, as we will see, the Noh cricket’s purely onomatopoetic cry – that do not stick with, do not adequately “give” the desired body in its moment of transformation. For the image to be, there could not have been many sounds or tongues in that oak wood, and the most surprisingly excised one is Japanese.

Noh Sounds in the Cloth of Beauty

Massimo Bacigalupo comments in passing that, as Daysair exits and the chorus remarks on her quiet departure, it is “one of the delicate Japanese characters Pound has in mind.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In fact, I would argue it is a very specific Japanese character. Not Komachi, who in the end reconciles with Shosho once he has a change of heart, but the abandoned wife in Kinuta, who ends her life with the “whispering lamentation, hera, hera” (P&T 423).Footnote ⁶⁰ From her death Pound’s WT is called into being – “hera, hera” – as if to amend the plays’ crucial difference: Though the nameless Japanese wife is a “good” wife like Daysair and not like the murdering Klytemnestra, the husband who has been “loitering on in the capital entangled in many litigations” is, unlike the equally litigating Herakles, “unknown and of no repute” (P&T 418). “All sunk into the river of three currents,” sent there by “the great, false bird called ‘Taking-care,’” the Noh wife has the chorus on her side: “Who will call him a true man – the wandering husband – when even the plants know their season” (P&T 424, 425). These are precisely the images that Pound’s Daysair starts with: for Akheloös, the “three-twisted river,” and for her husband who “never gets sight of his children, / like a farmer who sows a crop and doesn’t / look at it again till harvest” (P&T 1067). Pound amplifies the citationality associated with Daysair, by adding another layer of quotation or “double-talk,” and putting her very words in direct relation to the play’s other, “eastern” origin.

Both plays open with laments for the abandoned women, which rely on similar images from the natural world. The “sorrow” of the Japanese wife “is in the twigs of the duck’s nest,” just as Daysair “left alone” is “so sorry a bird” (P&T 419, 1070). The former also compares her sorrow to that of fish “held apart in the waves,” while her “tears are a rain in the silence” (419). The Greek chorus too conclude their song about Daysair’s sadness on a watery note as the wind blows “tireless / wave over wave to flood” (1070). Like Daysair, the Noh wife manipulates a cloth in order to call back her husband, inspired by something she has been told: She beats a silk-board every night “for that far-murmuring cloth could move his sleep – that is the tale – though he were leagues away” (420). Though she doesn’t make a tragic mistake, this action does not “ease [her] heart”; the cloth fails her, as it does Daysair, and she eventually gives up and dies (420). Both women are presented as entangled: Daysair “hark’d to reason in a foreign voice / Entangling her in ravage out of choice,” while the Noh wife’s heart is “entangled in the threads,” the threads of hearsay perhaps (1095, 424). Both cloths turn into flame, Daysair’s because of the centaur’s potion, the Noh wife’s because of her tears: “Her tears are shed on the silk-board, / Tears fall and turn into flame” (424). Finally, as Daysair’s “Tears green the cheek with bright dews / pouring down,” so the Noh wife becomes a “flower-heart of the grass [that] is blown on by a wind-like madness” (1096, 423).

But while Daysair’s “redemption” and the play’s intellectual/spiritual resolutions come through Herakles, who finally appears onstage once she has died (and who indeed would have been played by the same actor in the ancient performances), in Kinuta it is the ghost of the wife and not the living husband who is consumed by flame. It is she who could not escape from the “flaming of Karma” and who finally receives the illuminating law and is transformed:

The Japanese play doesn’t redeem the in any case unknown husband, but rewards the wife’s persistently reaffirmed (“constant beating”) Penelopean patience. Through this act, moreover, she has aligned sound and image, touching the heart of others and producing out of many elements singular beauty:

Even more than Daysair, then, the Noh wife is figured as a kind of artist, and her eventual reward is enlightenment. It was, we recall, another such onomatopoetic cricket song that Eliot had singled out in his 1917 review of Pound’s Noh plays, claiming its ingenious linguistic mixing as “a remarkable triumph of translator’s skill: it is certainly English, and it is certainly new in English” (CP 1, 567). Perhaps remembering Eliot’s praise, Pound is inspired in the early 1950s to try his hand again at Greek, at having Sophocles’ language, as x-rayed by his own, make the “one sound” of Hera(kles). He certainly considered the WT choruses to be his crowning achievement in form.Footnote ⁶¹

Though Pound told Michael Reck that he didn’t recall any lines “in particular” from the Noh that the latter could use in his Japanese translation of the WT choruses, it is hard not to think about the play as a rectification of Kinuta (perhaps further inspired by the resolution of the Komachi plays), with Herakles usurping the function of the wife’s spirit in the Japanese play (EP&J 236). If so, it would be a woman generating the arch-father after all – or it is perhaps to suppress her image that he is generated, substituting for her ghost and instituting a male lineage, just as Daysair’s telling folds are replaced by what “My father told me.” The departure of Daysair coincides with the disappearance of the chorus in Pound’s play, further indicating the erasure of the multiplicity of voice, of echoes that might be less coherent or well aligned with the message or “key phrase.” Indeed, the last choral song consists in the final heralding of Herakles’ appearance, while the chorus’s last words in Pound’s version, but not Sophocles’, put the burden of carrying Herakles on the whole of “Greece,” pitying the land and all of us for “the troubles coming / if you let such a man down” (P&T 1105),Footnote ⁶² if we fail to carry forward the message. For the Greco-Sino-Japanese ideogram of filiality to work, even the play’s titular chorus of women – who in Sophocles foresee mourning (penthos [Soph., Trach., line 1112]) and not troubles at the death and not the disappointment of Herakles – is pushed to the side, just as the Japanese wife who may well have called Pound’s play into being is exchanged for her husband.

Hyllos: Letting the Man Down

But WT does not end with the God-dance or with the law of Filial Obedience. If the image of fire, with its many imagist and pre-imagist echoes, becomes the “unifying Image” by beginning and closing the play, overwriting other potentially resonant images (such as the delton/sotoba/slab of wood or the woven gown), and presumably assuring its coherence, then we should also pay attention to that final fire Hyllos is supposed to light in order to earn his name. It is, however, the play’s other strand – the one that negotiates the meaning of evidence, of reading, witnessing, of the whole process of transmission – that becomes tied to handling the circulation and legacy of the Heraklean image. The play culminates in a sort of trial, which undermines its overall triumphant tone,Footnote ⁶³ much as the second stanza of “Little Gidding” iv qualifies the first.

Herakles’ injunction bears on something to be done, not read or written – res non verba: The “deep-rooted oaks” are to be “lopped off” and burnt by Hyllos; they do not speak to him. But Hyllos is a stickler for detail. Transporting us suddenly into an American courtroom, he agrees at first to obey Herakles – “I swear, so help me God” – and even repeats his father’s curse against “perjurers” (P&T 1109).Footnote ⁶⁴ When, however, he discovers what exactly he has to do in order not to “let such a man down,” he attributes the injunction to Herakles’ “delirium” and imagines himself in a transcendental court of justice, having to defend his actions. Pound consistently translates Sophoclean Hyllos’s concern with divine/moral right into more mundane legal concerns: Dyssebeia ‘impiety’ becomes “crime,” pandikōs ‘all-righteously’ is split into “legal” and “Perfectly all right” (P&T 1112; Soph., Trach., lines 1246–47). Though Hyllos is finally convinced that he “can’t be blamed for obeying” Herakles, his father does acquiesce and excuse him from having to light the fire that will burn him, showing essentially what Hyllos’s name had been telling us from the beginning: that the son is a lesser version of the father (P&T 1112).

Pound even rearranges the final scene to convey this turn for the worse. In his last speech in Sophocles, Herakles asks his soul to lead and be strong. Pound’s Herakles addresses these lines to Hyllos, who is still telling Herakles “You’re the driver” (P&T 1112). Hyllos instructs others to hoist Herakles onto the pyre and interprets the coherent Heraklean image as “the gods’ great unreason,” revealing that he has in fact seen and understood nothing of the coherent divine plan: “Gods! / Our present miseries, their shame,” he exclaims (P&T 1113). Pound even has Hyllos end the play instead of the Sophoclean chorus; declaring that “And all of this is from Zeus,” he may display the paternal lineage but it is as a degenerating one insofar as he hasn’t received the message. Rather than the glorious realization of an oracle, which happens for the most part through the “poetry” in the choruses, we have a court drama ending in a kind of betrayal, which is then followed by the realization that there is Tomorrow and that it is worse. There is no one there to “wr[i]te it down” or to sing, as Pound suggests by abolishing the chorus.

It falls to the Cantos to correct Sophocles, restoring the order that the translation couldn’t quite control. For at the end of WT we are far from the definition of “filial piety,” as expressed, for example, in Canto 98: “Filial piety is very inclusive: it does not include / Family squabbles over / land money, etcetera / Or pretendings” (711).Footnote ⁶⁵ Here filial piety is squabbles, even if not over land money. The next canto draws a sharp contrast to the Herakles–Hyllos “trial”: “To trace out and to bind together / From sonship this goes to clan / and to avoid litigations / out of the field, from the trees” (99/715). The Hyllos–Herakles relationship is key in this set of cantos because of their emphasis on “volgar’ eloquio taking the sense down to the people” (98/708). They focus on making Confucian teachings public and easily understandable – that is, passing them down – and so on the transmission of the solar vitality to the less-than-understanding son.

“Pen yeh” was glossed earlier as root and technē (706–07), whereas “volgar’ eloquio” can be analyzed into common/people and technē. What is done and the means of doing it have a craft, a technē, in common, but only if son and father work together. Concerned already at the end of WT about whether the ideogram he has presented has gotten off “the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register,” Pound takes up the drill (GK 51).Footnote ⁶⁶

Rock-Drill: Confirming Tragic Coherence

Pound’s return to the Cantos begins with what eventually became the end of Canto 86 and Cantos 87 and 88, and not with the lengthy Chinese-filled Canto 85.Footnote ⁷² That these sections include the bulk of the Sophoclean references suggests the significance of the latter in the restarting of the project. There are three tragic motifs in Rock-Drill, with a fourth appearing at two crucial moments. The first two are the ones identified in the WT note: Elektra’s οὐ ταῦτα … κακοῖσι (ou tauta … kakoisi; Soph., El., line 351, translated by Pound as “need we add cowardice to all the rest of these ills”) and the Heraklean λαμπρὰ συμβαίνει (or related moments). While the Trachinian phrase makes sense as a motto, especially given all the currents gathered in that play, the Elektra line is a more peculiar choice, particularly in light of Pound’s additive mode of translation there. By re-centering Elektra on that line, Pound belies his own translation of the play; he uses the phrase to resolve or obscure the issues the translation had raised and instead fully aligns its mourned figure with Mussolini qua righteous ruler, while specifically eliding the faultier Agamemnon – who does make several appearances in Pound’s composition notebooks of this period.Footnote ⁷³ It is perhaps in order to more fully overwrite those Elektran echoes that Pound uses the Eumenides here (instead of resorting to the Agamemnon as previously), admitting that he needs the neat Aeschylean conclusion to get out of the indeterminacy of the Sophoclean version of the myth. So, without recourse to Greek, except occasionally to name Ἀθάνα ‘Athena,’ we find in Rock-Drill frequent mentions of “the jury trial at Athens.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Finally, Pound twice quotes from Antigone’s famous first stasimon on the wondrousness of humankind, as if to provide a complement to Cocteau’s key phrase and show the non-“invented” justice of the earth as against the perverted new justice of Kreon. In contrast to the relatively open-ended treatment of Aeschylus in the Pisan Cantos and to the ambiguities of the Sophocles translations, it is a more directional and explicitly political reading that is proposed through these plays in the late cantosFootnote ⁷⁵ as Pound attempts to rebuild the foundation both of his poem and of a loosely conceived polis on the basis of the following elements: links to the earth (Antigone), courage of action (Elektra), intellectual illumination (Trachiniai), justice (Eumenides). By acting in accordance with the “root,” one suffers but achieves divine-ordered coherence (Herakles/Orestes), and that gives rise (or could) to a well-run polis, the specifics of whose governance Thrones will address.

The three main plays all appear together in the opening pages of Canto 87:

The canto begins in medias res, ostensibly picking up from the last line of the preceding poem – “Bellum cano perenne …” (86/588; ‘I sing perennial war’). Such an opening together with its programmatic introductory phrase is no doubt meant to echo the incompletion at the beginning and end of the very first canto (“And then,” “So that:”; 1/3, 5) and signify the whole project’s reorientation. Eliot’s “Hollow Men” v is faintly recalled through the startling “between,”Footnote ⁷⁶ an echo that may have passed unnoticed if not for the almost direct quotation from “The Music of Poetry” (“no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job”; CP 6, 320), highlighted too by the Italian “mettere” ‘put,’ punning on “meter.” The careful reader of the Cantos knows that the missing answer to Mussolini’s half-quoted/half-translated question to Pound in 1932 is “pel mio poema” ‘for my poem’ (recalled again in 93/646). The absent referent is in any case filled in contextually through the other metapoetic clues, making clear the kind of process that the poet is engaged in in Rock-Drill. He casts himself as another Herakles who will not add cowardice but will instead finally reveal the coherence, the ordering of the parts. But the canto’s first two lines also alert us to a different context, for the other performer of “a good job” is of course the “usuress” Klytemnestra (82/543); it is her ambiguous ghost, her “good job” from the Pisan Cantos, that is exorcised throughout this canto. As we read a few lines below, “attention to outlet, no attention to source, / That is: the problem of issue” (87/589).

On the next page, two more tragic women speak, this time in Greek:

The Greek line combines WT with Elektra. The first segment is taken from Deianeira’s description of the effects of Nessus’s poison on the wool with which she daubed Herakles’ peplos: τοῦτ᾽ ἠφάνισται διάβορον πρὸς οὐδενὸς / τῶν ἔνδον, ἀλλ᾽ ἐδεστὸν ἐξ αὑτοῦ φθίνει (Soph., Trach., lines 676–77); “just disappeared. / Nobody touched it. / Seemed to corrode of itself. / Ate itself up” (P&T 1090). Pound splices it together with Elektra’s πρὸς κακοῖσι ‘[adding] to ills’ in order to suggest moral in addition to material decay. The centaur Nessus becomes a figure both for “the pusillanimous” and for those who “crumbl[e] from simple dishonesty,” those who destroy others but also themselves in the process. But this heightened descent is stemmed through Latin, which denies it (“impossibile”) by proposing a “ver novum,” a new spring.Footnote ⁷⁷ This refrain from the Pervigilium Veneris echoes a prescient poem of that title in Hilda’s Book, which centers on being reborn in/through the beloved, who, unlike Daysair, “spellest ever gold from out my dross / Mage powerful and subtly sweet / Gathering fragments that there be no loss” (5).Footnote ⁷⁸ Such an alternative, out of a despairing Greek vision, is emphasized by the ideogram that follows and that signifies “rest” (87/591).

It is now that Pound reaches further back than the Sophoclean tragedies – after all, this is the moment in WT when Deianeira in her “tragic mask” finally realizes her misunderstanding of Nessus’s imaginary delton – and finds the Eumenides:

What “Athens” recognized was the need for a principle of order that is outside the system and that underlies it – a way to make the many languages cohere, or the many local customs come together at the root, as Canto 99 in Thrones will suggest. Right and light are aligned, reaching a presumed apex in Alexander – who, in Pound’s mind, is also responsible for sound economic policy – before collapsing, leaving Greece permanently in the dark ages, and bequeathing to the West a proliferation of statutes that “Mus.” like a new Athena proposed to sort out. The section’s conclusion returns to Deianeira to clarify the tenor in which she was quoted before: not as one of the pusillanimous usurers (like, we presume, Klytemnestra), but as a ladyFootnote ⁷⁹ who performed a necessary act. Unconsciously attuned to the rhythms of the earth and for the good of the state, she enabled the building of light (and, as I suggested in my reading above, it is she herself who must be seen and exorcised by this light). Mussolini, in his unattributed “key phrase,” provides the final seal of approval, and allows Pound to return to the economic theme of issue. The canto suggests that any possibility of renewal (the make-it-new ideogram has also appeared) depends on the ability to return to or reuse raw materials – just as Pound himself does here with Athenian tragedy, as well as with the many light motifs that he presents – whose value hasn’t been perverted or artificially inflated/deflated (“Pity to stamp save by weight” [87/592]) and can thus be used “as barter” rather than hoarded. Later on the same page Cocteau appears, with his telltale social commentary (“‘A few’ said Jean C. / ‘gros legumes.’” [87/592]), completing the Poundian canon of tragic references, now fully integrated into the political/economic program of the poem.

The identification between the order of the city and the order of the poem, as well as between Athena, Mussolini, and the poet himself, recurs near the end of Canto 89:

Canto 89’s stated aim has been “to know the histories” (610), and so, having named his poem (“Rock Drill”) and slant-rhymed two of its current pillars (Ἀθήνη [Athēnē]–Mussolini, bound by the “ordine” that combines their vowel sounds), Pound moves through his own prehistory, even surreptitiously laying claim to the dissemination of the telegraph by ventriloquizingFootnote ⁸⁰ Thomas Benton’s granddaughter to write, without quotation marks, “My grandfather boosted Morse’ telegraph” (89/621). He recalls his forerunners both in recording the “tale of the tribe” through word and image – by quoting “old Image (Selwyn)” on the importance of Ruskin “‘to us,’” then “old Gustav [Flaubert],” then “Henry J.[ames] [who] had Coburn take photographs” – and in fighting a “bellum perenne” against corrupt enemies (“Tasso, Kidd [Kyd], Raleigh, all jailed”) (89/621, 622). But he also returns to the prehistory of Athena’s hung jury: “Agamemnon killed that stag, against hunting rites,” and so became a “father of war” (89/622).Footnote ⁸¹ This different shading of Agamemnon – not present in the Pisan Cantos nor emphasized in Elektra and closer to the attitude displayed in Pound’s early engagement with Aeschylus’s play – allows Pound to subsume him into the pattern of necessary disorder/suffering that will produce order. At the same time, Agamemnon’s alignment with “Judge Marshall” (89/622), who ratified the second U.S. Bank, suggests his crime too might have been one of usury (“contra naturam”) and his war a civil war, and thus separates him from the transcendental authority that Mussolini becomes in these cantos.

Given these resonances, it should come as less of a surprise that the end of Canto 85, placed first in Rock-Drill but written after the passages above, programmatically hits the same notes, and offers a reprise of the Pisan Cantos opening:

The Athenian jury trial – sans Athena – is presented as a counterexample to the Mussolini–Agamemnon murder in the Piazzale Loreto and to Mary Surratt’s questionable trial by military court for Lincoln’s murder (Holohan was a potential witness). Both leader and female maybe-murderer were hanged (unjustly in Pound’s eyes) because the Athenian precedent, developed to respond to an even worse murderous predicament, was not heeded. The first item of business – evidenced by the ostentatious self-naming of the poem in Canto 89 above – is to close out the Sophoclean play through Aeschylus, and thus the foundation of the Areopagus is placed at the heart of this Poundian rock (that the original “father of war,” namely Ares, was legendarily acquitted on the Athenian rock does not seem to figure in Pound’s calculus, though it may be why he never names it). But now, the poet, like Herakles, has to “ris[k] the smoke to go forward,” not adding cowardice (δειλίαν) and attempting to disseminate the Athenian Sagetrieb. An unusual note appended to the end of this canto rhymes nicely with the Elektra quote in its refusal of addition: “Kung said he had added nothing” (85/579). The note, moreover, tells us how we should then take this whole set of cantos: not as addition or invention, but as “confirmation,” and, as the word implies, that is both an empirical and a religious process (579).

“get yr ear full of greek”: Politics, or the Sounds in the Oak Wood

Once the poem’s political-didactic program has been established, with all the tragedies put in their proper place, Rock-Drill can tackle what for Pound had always been the most unruly element of Greek: its sound and, by extension, its voices, which had been erased yet still registered in the WT translation. Canto 86 seems to admit the play’s polylingual tree as a deterrent to war, but only in order to again prune it down to one sound.

In the first line Pound silently translates a remark by Bismarck, then in the third and fourth quotes the Italian queen Margherita’s plea before translating it in the last two lines of the passage. The unattributed quotation (?) in English in the middle seems to suggest the importance of intercultural communication, cutting across both religious and linguistic lines, in the avoidance of war. Still, the languages chosen here (German and Italian, in addition to English) cannot be taken innocently, especially as the canto then modulates towards Mussolini and an attack on the British government. Indeed, perhaps “it can’t be all in one language,” but as the continuation of the passage suggests, all the languages point to the same conclusion:

Mussolini’s statement regarding the right to (“alla”) rather than of (“della”) property was already praised in the Pisan Cantos as showing “the old hand as stylist still holding its cunning” when daring to “dream the Republic” of Salò (78/498). Here, Mussolini’s insistence on such linguistic precision becomes an exemplar of not piling up the ills, of taking action to cut through them. Hence the way Pound cuts the Elektra quote here – “not these … [to] ills” – so that it becomes a statement rather than a question, and also excludes in advance the “ill” Elektra most fears at that moment: cowardice.

The linguistic alignment Pound effects in this passage is carefully plotted; the three languages, Italian, Greek, and English, all make the same sound and move to the same rhythm. Pound elides two words from this Greek quotation:Footnote ⁸² πρός ‘to,’ which will be supplied a few pages below (87/590), and δειλίαν ‘cowardice,’ which has been supplied a few pages above (85/579). Δειλίαν is the more notable semantic absence and, as I have suggested, may be intentionally omitted. It is not wholly absent, however, since it sonically echoes in the lines above and below: rejected in the form of the Italian “della” (thus δειλίαν, deilian is identified with the idea of the right of property), modified and accepted in “Drill” (in its meaning of repetitive exercise, drill is the opposite of cowardice-inaction), which is visually aligned with the ellipses in the Greek line.Footnote ⁸³ The Mussolinian “alla” is then taken up in “Alexander,” Rock-Drill’s other favorite model leader, the ds and ls of deilian now exorcised and tying Alexander not to cowardice but instead to the “debts” of his “soldiery” which he “paid.” Prosodically, the Italian phrase is in Pound’s favorite stress-based adonic foot (dactyl + trochee), while the three-word announcement of the section’s name – here given for the first time within the body of the poem – falls one syllable short (hence the indent) of the adonic, but gestures towards its alternate realization as dactyl (here trochee) + spondee. Temporally, then, or quantitatively speaking, the lines are equivalent, each having seven positions. The Greek line as presented could be parsed into an opening spondee and closing trochee as well. The renewed poetic, political, and (non-)translation projects are thus inextricably tied, with three languages all saying one thing: “Rock Drill,” coming out of “alla non della,” is essentially the positive translation of “οὐ κ(ακοῖσι) δειλίαν.” “Section” itself picks up the remaining Greek sounds.

In a draft notebook passage with related Rock-Drill materials, Pound had scribbled the injunction “get yr ear full of greek,”Footnote ⁸⁴ but as we have seen, Greek sonorities are deployed differently here, correcting the Elektra. In the speech from which the Sophoclean line is taken, Elektra berates her sister Chrysothemis for forgetting their father and for speaking the mother tongue: “YOU didn’t think of any of that / it’s just what she told you” (Elek, lines 392–93).Footnote ⁸⁵ She also insists on the efficacy of her own mourning, on her lament as action, in which Chrysothemis doesn’t participate: “but when I’m all out to do right by my father, / will you come in on it? No. You try to put me off it” (Elek, lines 398–99).Footnote ⁸⁶ While Pound in 1949 had translated the line and the whole exchange into his own mother tongue without much issue, like another Chrysothemis, he now doubly translates it into the Italian father tongue: first sonically and second through the alignment between Elektra’s word-actions and Mussolini’s, whose celebrated act here is, we recall, linguistic in nature. The latter could be said for the poet too, insofar as his borrowed title “Rock Drill” comes from the masculinist ethos of vorticism and a 1913 Jacob Epstein sculpture by this name. Greek sound becomes sculpture, not simply written down under the father’s tree, but now firmly cut in rock.

Rock-Drill concludes with a final clarification of the relationship between language and politics as Pound in Canto 95 addresses and implicitly argues for his treatment of the Sophoclean πολυγλώσσου. It is a complex maneuver that relies on the philosophical-political articulation of human society by Aristotle and Dante as well as on the Antigone as a correction or complement to the moment of coherence in WT. In both cases, it is defining humanity’s proper connection to nature that is at stake, and thus also separating out the right from the wrong “sounds in that oak-wood.”

The passage draws a distinction between the “political” and the “compagnevole” (social, company-seeking): Which is to be preferred as a translation of Aristotle’s definition of the human as a πολιτικὸν ζῷον (politikon zōon ‘animal’)?Footnote ⁸⁷ The former is identified with Rémy de Gourmont’s understanding of the bourgeoisie as reproducing (“reproducteur”), taxpaying, voting animals, the latter presumably refers to individuals seeking each other’s company because of “love” (the canto’s first word, a few lines above this passage) – love of each other or of what they have in common.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the chapter of the Convivio quoted here Dante himself is concerned with the building of cities and with the avoidance of war. He argues that a monarchy over the whole earth is necessary to stem humanity’s ever acquisitive nature and allow humans to live in a society of love and happiness and not of war. For Dante this state is equally natural, or at least “that for which” (“quello per esso”) humans are born.Footnote ⁸⁹

In addition to preferring or even defending Dante’s “mistranslation” of Aristotle’s πολιτικόν over the word’s seemingly transparent translation into “political,” Pound also attempts to retrieve, à la Heidegger, a different strand in the potential meaning of πόλις (polis) through the verb πολεύω (poleuō) ‘to turn up the soil with the plough’ (LSJ ii). Thus he would again contrast to the infinitely reproducing (tekousa/tokos) painted paradise of the modern capitalist bourgeoisie an organic, natural vision. This meaning of πολεύω – rather than LSJ i ‘turn or go about’ the city or the firmament – is best exemplified, including in LSJ, by the first stasimon in Antigone, which memorably opens, “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.” But Pound is interested in its end:

Pound has already quoted lines 337–38 (underlined above) in Canto 88 in reference to Nathaniel Macon, “an ardent Jeffersonian and an opponent of the reestablishment of the Bank of the United States.”Footnote ⁹¹ As described by that canto’s main historical source, Thomas Benton’s Thirty Years’ View (wr. 1854–56), Macon

Macon is attuned both to the earth’s plenty, its Sophoclean unwearying productivity (and not to the banks), and to other people (“compagnevole”). He is thus exemplary of the human deinotēs (wonderfulness or formidableness) praised in Antigone’s stasimon.

Canto 88 connects to our passage in 95 not only through Antigone but also through Aristotle. Earlier in that poem, another series of Greek privative α-adjectives has been quoted:

There is an intertwining here between the usual terms of the bellum perenne (tithing and planting vs. indiscriminately hogging the harvest) and Pound’s metapoetics, as introduced by “cano” ‘I sing.’ Most obviously he suggests through Erigena that it is the Greek correlation that will provide the firm foundation for God’s “throne” – and this should come as no surprise given the treatment of such tags earlier in Rock-Drill. The requisite “greek tag” follows to confirm Delcroix:Footnote ⁹² ἀφρήτωρ, ἀθέμιστος, ἀνέστιος (“clanless, lawless, hearthless”),Footnote ⁹³ which Terrell’s Companion rightly identifies as Iliad 9.63. However, the real source for Pound here is, I believe, the same Aristotle passage referred to by Dante in the Convivio quote used in Canto 95: Politics 1.1.9. There the philosopher cites Homer’s condemnation of such a “clanless, lawless, hearthless” man as support for his own point that “man is by nature a political animal [physei politikon zōon], and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless [apolis] is either low in the scale of humanity or above it.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Homer also allows Aristotle to make the connection to war; after the Iliadic quotation, he comments that a man who is by nature like the one described by Homer will also be desirous of war. The way to avoid war lies in a particular feature of human society; for this is the very same section of the Politics in which Aristotle links humanity’s essential “political” nature to logos:

He proceeds to distinguish between phōnē ‘voice’ and logos: The former is capable of giving signs (sēmeia) for sensations and is shared by animals, while the latter “is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right [dikaion] and the wrong [adikon]” (1.1.10). This human ability to both perceive and communicate justice is what allows the making (poiei) of a “household [oikian] and a city-state [polis]” (1.1.11). The full Aristotelian reference illuminates Pound’s heavy reliance on quotations in setting up this section of Canto 88 as an antidote to the “bellum perenne”: He allows his speakers themselves to say what is just and what is unjust, and it is on that basis that he will build his own polis.

Thus we return full circle to Canto 95’s πολεύω. The link between the polis and speech in Politics (and actually later on in the Antigone stasimon as well)Footnote ⁹⁶ prompts Pound to finally recall the Sophoclean πολυγλώσσου here, and to do so in order to implicitly justify its exclusion from the play. That is, the move between πολεύω and πολύγλωσσος may obviously be a homophonic pun, but it is exactly the kind of move Pound in theory wants to limit. In the earlier passage from Canto 88 the farmer’s simplicity of action (planting his trees) is accompanied by a simplicity of language – language reduced to a repetitive deictic (“That tree, and that tree,” etc.), consisting only in the link between word and referent, plus memory. Such simplicity is endorsed by the poet: “Get the meaning across and then quit,” the prescribed silence reinforced in the Italian “altro che tacita [another who quiets (himself)]” as well. So, here, Pound sonically attempts to enact what for Aristotle is the unique human capacity: to discern which of the natural voices or sounds (in the “oak-wood”) should be followed, which are harmful and which advantageous – to untangle πολιτικός from the similar-sounding political, reproducteur, paradis peint, and πολύγλωσσος (and perhaps also the Aristotelian πόλεμος ‘war’), and to “rectify” it into compagnevole, πολεύω, and plough.Footnote ⁹⁷

In a section that didn’t make into the Cantos, the same closeness between language and order is registered: “illustrates speech – / (also) / as a medium / the problem of order. / (rock-drill) / + Earp has made a few remarks about / Σοφοκλες.”Footnote ⁹⁸ As discussed, what interested Pound most in Earp’s remarks was the scholar’s highlighting of Sophocles’ use of different dialects and registers (“speech”), and his suggestion that, despite this local variation, the plays displayed “order” – that is the business of “rock-drill.” Having first delimited the oak-tree’s sounds, Pound then uses Canto 95 to supplement the political order hinted at but at the same time doubted at the end of WT. So, how do now we get from a glōssa, reduced by Pound to “sound” rather than ‘tongue’ or ‘language,’ to the logos (speech and ratio)Footnote ⁹⁹ that conveys what is just and allows for the building of a city that is beneficial to all, and is based on the natural turnings of the inexhaustible earth? It is history that comes in to further clarify sound in a way it could not in the translation of the play: “Benton: when there was plenty of metal, / Van Buren already desmearing Talleyrand / J.A. ‘the whole people (devaluation).’ / Alexander paid the debts of his soldiery” (95/664). From these historical examples of true political action, the canto turns to the question of lineage and continuing tradition, negative and positive – another one of the loose ends in WT. Pound sympathetically recalls the fascist Admiral Uberti, who wondered whether he too, “six centuries after” his ancestor Lapo degli Uberti, would die in exile “also from some vento di siepe” (i.e., shot in ambush; 664). Further down, we read of “YAO’s worry: to find a successor,” which led him to skip his own son in favor of someone else whom he thought to be the “one man” for the job (664) – unlike, it is perhaps implied, Herakles, who focused on the apparently less competent Hyllos. A similar case of mismatch between power, position, and lineage follows: “& the three years peace we owe Windsor / ’36–’39” (665). England’s Edward VIII had of course abdicated at the end of 1936, and so his supposedly great act wasn’t “political” in the official narrow sense, but was, in Pound’s mistaken estimation, more fundamentally “compagnevole” in its goal of peace.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Armed thus with Aristotle and Dante, but also with the divine and earthly ethical-political programs detected in the Eumenides and the Antigone, Pound concludes Rock-Drill having successfully re-founded his poem on the Greek rock and tightly re-aligned its sounds with its politics.

The Common Greek of Thrones: From Odysseus to Digenis

The conclusion of Rock-Drill in Canto 95 prepares for and clarifies Pound’s linguistic and lexicographical program in Thrones.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In this last finished section of the Cantos, the excess of language is constantly condemned and becomes aligned with excessive luxury in the poem’s persistent critique of “Taozers” and Buddhists:

In contrast, the Confucian Salt Commissioner is recorded as “in volgar’ eloquio taking the sense down to the people” (98/708), while Ford Madox Ford is recalled urging that we “get a dictionary / and learn the meaning of words” (98/709; more stridently at 100/739), and thus not over- or misuse them. “State the laws in clear language” (98/712), “Illumine the words of procedure” (98/718), we keep reading. Appropriately, there is more explication and apparent dictionary use for Greek words in Thrones than anywhere else in the poem – and there are more Greek words here than anywhere else. The goal is likewise coherence; the word συμβαίνει appears even in the context of Coke’s Institutes to refer to the “concord” achieved in a properly functioning court of law. Coke thus offers another contrast with the “court” of WT, consonant with the “Jury trial … in Athens” that is again recalled on the very last page of Thrones (109/792, 109/794). As Kindellan shows through his careful reading of the figure of Leucothea/Leucothoe, Pound performs a “twining of previously discrete entities.”Footnote ¹⁰² That is, “rather than a single word meaning different things, different words mean the same thing.”Footnote ¹⁰³ After the lesson of Canto 95, there is now only one sound in that oak wood.

Unlike Eliot’s common logos, which must remain obscure, untranslatable, even if its tolling is heard, Pound’s “one” language relies on transparency, on “philological” demonstrability, on translatability. On the formal level we see this in Pound’s treatment of the written form of Greek. He alternates between quoting in Greek characters, in an English transcription, and in a translation proper, the latter either presented immediately as in a dictionary entry or, unlike in earlier cantos, far from the immediate vicinity of the citation. For example, Athena’s words about Nestor in Odyssey 3.20 (ψεῦδος δ᾽ οὐκ ἐρέει: μάλα γὰρ πεπνυμένος ἐστί) appear in these different forms in 98/706 (Greek), 99/717 (translation: “Nestor ‘too intelligent to prevaricate.’”), 102/749 (transcription). Unlike in Elektra or in the Pisan Cantos, the three renderings are not made to interact and are thus not probed or questioned, but are treated as interchangeable; it is no accident that the statement reiterated is that Nestor tells the truth. This process, so necessary to these late cantos, is conceived quite consciously through the non-reading of Sophocles’ πολυγλώσσου outlined above, while both earlier (Odyssey) and later (Eparch’s Book, Digenis Akritis) Greek texts are made to conform to the one “right” sound until language is potentially overcome altogether.

Explicit references to tragedy are few in Thrones, except for the luminous details of “splendour” (which in any case is not exclusive to WT in Pound’s oeuvre) and συμβαίνει, and the positive and negative examples drawn through the filiality and centaur motifs already highlighted. Canto 99 implicitly picks up many of the resonances and leftovers from WT and tries to bring them together in an attempt to have “all converge as the root” (99/714):

“Splendour” is consistently linked in Thrones with the ideograms for hsien and ming, which Pound understands as “manifest intelligence” (intelligence itself is “the total light process”);Footnote ¹⁰⁴ equally consistently, though, he glosses these ideograms as “the silk cords of the sunlight,” which “non si disuna” ‘doesn’t disunite itself’ (98/713, 99/714, my emphasis and translation). This image is echoed in the passage above and recalls both Daysair’s woven gown and Kinuta’s cloth and weaving loom, as if Pound is again tying up that loose end, reabsorbing the women into the texture of his poem as the other side of the Heraklean illumination of the intellect. This is consistent with later developments in the canto. There seems to be room for some accounting for local difference, an attempt to build in heterogeneity, to in some ways acknowledge the potential of a multilingual tree: “the sages of Han” say that “Manners are from earth and from water / They arise out of hills and streams” so “The spirit of air is of the country” and “Men’s manners cannot be one / (same, identical)” (99/718). But the door only opens to be shut, as Pound demonstrates on the next page. Having referred to the Crusaders, to his own grandfather, to Khati and Al Kindi, Synesius and H. L. Mencken, he writes:

The sets of rules may vary in accordance to the “air,” but they are underwritten by the catholic or “koine” values of vigour and tranquility which arise from “faith with the word.” Even the gesture of “ix, i.e. nine” depicts on a small scale the “one root,” the translatability that is guaranteed by the “word” as an object of divine worship – or, as a token with credit to back it up. “All must die, but if the people be without faith (fail of their word) nothing stands,” Pound translates in the Analects (P&T 708).

In this section of the poem Pound expands his linguistic-cum-political Greek inquiries to Homeric vocabulary and to the tenth-century Eparch’s Book. The latter is the main topic of the first Thrones canto, whose preoccupations follow directly from the linguistic-delimitation program outlined in Canto 95. The transition between Cantos 95 and 96 occurs through the nymph Leucothea appearing with “pity” at the end of the former (95/667), and disappearing in the beginning of the latter, just as she does near the end of Odyssey 5, where she offers Odysseus her veil. Thrones and especially the Byzantine society depicted in the section’s first text is thus introduced as if it is the nostalgically re-approached, well-functioning land of the Phaeacians – “νόστου / γαίης Φαιήκων, …” concludes Canto 95 (667; Odyssey 5.344–45)Footnote ¹⁰⁵ – and seems to live up to that characterization: “Here, surely, is a refinement of language” (96/679). Canto 96 is consumed with lexicography. It contains an indented, italicized note defending Pound’s choice to tackle such obscure material; it includes lengthy quotations in Greek and English, snide remarks against the editor of the Eparch’s Book and against the LSJ; and finally it incorporates a four-column table mapping Greek words onto what looks like their English definitions and then onto ideograms, which are further accompanied by their English transliteration. Linguistic transparency is the order of the day.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In Canto 96 Pound writes in what at first may appear as his Elektran Anglo-Greek idiom. But whereas in his version of the tragedy the principle of linguistic equivalence in translation was put into question, here Pound records his own process of decipherment, gets it across, and then basta:

The Greek words are transcribed and selectively though not incorrectly interpreted; unsurprisingly, Pound’s focus is on “the root,” on etymological readings, as it will be in his reading of Chinese later in Thrones. Then their meaning is forcefully brought together in several complete English phrases before the passage concludes emphatically with two Greek words – one wrongly transcribed but potentially readable in English (sun ‘with’ + them[e]), the other presumably too difficult to transcribe – and Pound moves on to the next section of the book, marked by capitalization.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ When the Eparch’s Book’s editor Jules Nicole seems to have inadvertently engaged in interlingual wordplay, something Pound himself might have done in his more playful modes,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ he is mocked for it:

Pound implies that Nicole is seduced by the visual similarity of the Greek preposition ἄνευ ‘without’ (in the phrase ἄνευ εἰδήσεως ‘without notice’) to the French noun aveu ‘confession, admission’ and fails to translate εἰδήσεως with attention to linguistic nicety, opting instead for a stronger rendering. Like another Deianeira, he pays attention to the wrong “tongue” of the Greek tree. Canto 97 clarifies the stakes of this kind of lexicography, identifying terminological precision with equity, and the metaphysical with the physical.

The three “metas” in this passage – Greek, English phonetic transcription, English grammatical appropriation – are equated, “in with” each other regardless of their material representation on the page. And so something presumably metaphysical – for example, equity – can be forced to inhere in the physical, while at the same time helping elevate “mere terminology” into a world-governing principle.

After Pound has examined the well-governed tenth-century Phaeacia of Leo VI’s Byzantine court, he must return, like Odysseus, to Ithaca itself. The unfinished business of the Trachiniai (and the Sophoclean Elektra) may explain Pound’s newfound interest not in Odysseus’s adventures (beyond the Leucothea moment), but in those he left behind: Penelope and Telemachus. Bringing the Odyssey back into the poem is another way to exorcise Kinuta’s wife, by proving that her Penelopean patience was warranted since, Pound wants to claim, Odysseus was both a good husband and a great ruler, not one who “mete[s] and dole[s] / Unequal laws unto a savage race,” as Tennyson would have it. Pound’s notebooks clearly indicate that he is closely reading through the first books of the Odyssey.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Only a handful of moments make it into the Cantos, but the fact that Confucius to Cummings anthologizes mostly passages from Books 4 and 14 strongly conveys his interest in them at this time. As he writes in the introductory note to that last anthology, Homer “showed interest in practical affairs…. Various dimensions of his writing have received inadequate publicity” (ix), and it is those that Pound is publicizing now. His review entails a rereading of Odysseus as a man of action and governance, not of words, even if we are parenthetically told that “Odysseus’ old ma missed his conversation” (99/714, 717) in an instance of Pound himself filling in a translation gap left in Canto 1.

Canto 102 reorients Odysseus away from language and towards action, first quite literally by changing the Odyssey’s words. But Pound also shows Odysseus evolve as it were historically from the rumorological universe of the Homeric epic through Sappho, Ovid, and Plotinus into the Byzantine borderlands of the ninth-/tenth-century Greek vernacular epic Digenis Akritis – essentially planting him into the period of the Eparch’s Book. The dictionary procedure of Canto 96 works less efficiently in the case of Homer; for example, Pound returns multiple times to the explication of “the colour as aithiops” (102/750, 97/695).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Still, here too the poet willfully excises language in order to have “ground to stand on”:

In Odyssey 2.272, Athena in the guise of Mentor praises Odysseus: οἷος κεῖνος ἔην τελέσαι ἔργον τε ἔπος τε (“such a man was he to fulfill both deed and word”; my emphasis on the words used by Pound).Footnote ¹¹¹ Evidently the transcription in Canto 102 above is incorrect, Pound having substituted “EROS” ‘love’ for “EPOS” ‘word’ some time during the drafting process.Footnote ¹¹² As in the Heraklean moment of WT, the polysemic epos (word–epic) is left out – potentially too engaged with the Taozers’ billion wordings. But now Pound is trying to bring the similarly excised erōs back in. The key word here is “TELESAI” ‘complete, fulfill, do’: An “ERGON” and “EROS” can be finished or perfected, while words seem to continue, especially those of Odysseus. He is the man who quintessentially does not stand by his word, spinning a new story every time he has a new audience – even, cruelly, to his aged father in Odyssey 24. Odysseus’s reliance on word rather than “fact” is suggested by the Kalypso–Hermes rumor mill outlined in the canto’s opening lines, with Pallas’s “lie” quickly following in order to help us appropriately color the nature of the information provided by the aforementioned gods.Footnote ¹¹³ Pound is, however, quick to pivot to Odysseus’s more desirable qualities with his first, also inaccurately transcribed, quotation from Homer: “keinas … e Orgei.” In Odyssey 4.693 (not 639), we hear Penelope herself praising Odysseus: κεῖνος δ᾽ οὔ ποτε πάμπαν ἀτάσθαλον ἄνδρα ἐώργει (“yet he never dealt intemperately at all with any man”; my emphasis on the words used by Pound). It is a remarkable passage in Greek, for three consecutive lines end with a version of ergon: ἐώργει ‘did, wrought’ (translated as “dealt with” above), ἔργα ‘works, deeds,’ ἐυεργέων ‘well-done [deeds]’ (693–95). This recurrence provides the justification for Pound’s condensation of the first line into simply “e Orgei.” While Penelope suggests Odysseus didn’t do anything bad to anyone, in Canto 102 we are supposed to read only that “he does.” That is, the poem wants to praise the man of action no matter the result (Analects 12.21.3: “Put first the action, second the success” [P&T 710]).

Pound’s transliteration (beyond the clear error of “keinas” instead of “keinos”) allows him to integrate the Odyssean quotation into a larger pattern set up in the canto. In “e Orgei” (for ἐώργει), the freestanding “e” may be read as an emphatic Italian “and” or as a shortened “eu” ‘good’ (present in Penelope’s subsequent ἐυεργέων); more likely, it is separated out in order to show that “orgy” is part of this lexical family too.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Pound would have also seen in LSJ that the verb ἔρδω itself (of which ἐώργει is a form) has a specific secondary meaning of “offer a sacrifice.” He is, then, already orienting the canto towards Demeter, and towards his obsession with the productivity of the earth, seen clearly on the next page when he translates two separate references to barley in the Odyssey (2.290 translated in the last line quoted above and 4.761). Through the action of ritual Pound connects this newly interesting part of the Odyssey to the Cantos’ earlier uses of Books 10 and 11: “AISSOUSIN [dart], / the spirits,” Circe tells Odysseus when describing the underworld, to which she sends him and which we had visited in Canto 1 (102/750; Odyssey 10.495). And so the poet, “lit by the torch-flare” like another Odysseus-cum-Herakles, lets select “dead words out of fashion” into his poem:

We are back to the Trachinian image, the moment of visible intelligibility: “gloss” as shine and “gloss” as explanation become one, the physical “in with” the metaphysical. Glowing, electrified Odysseus, the just ruler and worker of the rites of the earth, continues the paradigm set down through the four tragedies in Rock-Drill, turning into Antigone and Herakles, Elektra and Athena all at once and letting only the right dead words through.

The other ancient texts Pound interweaves into the opening of Canto 102 provide implicit support for his slanted reading of the Odyssey and begin to clarify the relation between language and love that was suppressed in WT. Leucothoe’s resistance to Apollo fits in well with the anti-rhetorical thrust of the passage; Apollo Loxias ‘crooked’ is the god who doesn’t speak straight. Even more relevant here, Ovid recounts that Venus made Apollo/Helios fall in love with Leucothoe as a punishment for his gossiping: for revealing her affair with Mars to Vulcan.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Erōs in exchange for epos indeed. This is a story already sung by the Phaeacian bard Demodokos in the Odyssey itself, but with a crucial difference: In Homer there is no punishment for Helios’s tattling (and thus no Leucothoe). In Pound’s mind, then, Ovid may well have been correcting his predecessor.Footnote ¹¹⁶ So Pound himself corrects the variously “ungrounded” Apollonian writers named: Yeats with his oracular/mediumistic fascination, Eliot with his fastidiousness, Lewis with his hyper-masculine austerity. He recalls and identifies with the earthly/Dionysian Demeter instead, whose mourning was, at least in Ovid, also explicitly caused by Venus (Metamorphoses 5.365–79); Canto 106 will pick up this Eleusinian motif. On the flipside, the potentially positive relation between love and language is also highlighted here, in the line that follows the Homeric misquotation: “The cat talks μάω / (mao) with a greek inflection.” This is another reversal of a Trachinian elision; whereas there Sapphic desire had been suppressed, here Sappho’s Fragment 36 (καὶ ποθήω καὶ μάομαι [“I long and yearn”; trans. Campbell]) is evoked. Terrell suggests that the “Greek root [is] used here only for sound.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Actually, this morpheme of desire provides “confirmation” for the substitution of erōs for epos, leaving no gap between them; it exemplifies a natural language which, like barley, is the “marrow of men” (my emphasis). That Pound may have intentionally altered the Homeric line to write in “EROS” is finally suggested by Pound’s admission later on the same page that “Eva has improved that line about Freiheit” (102/749). Referring to his German translator Eva Hesse’s version of a line about free radio speech from Canto 74,Footnote ¹¹⁸ Pound is perhaps giving himself permission to do the same with Homer, the line about “Eva” serving as his roundabout confession (“aveu”) to us.

The rest of Canto 102 seems devoted to the naturalization of linguistic signs – “From the nature, the sign” (102/750).Footnote ¹¹⁹ First we have the isolated Homeric words cited above, whose common denominator seems to be that the colors they designate are linked to specific tangible objects: aith[i]ops ‘dark-glinting’ to a flame (aithō = burn), oinops ‘wine-colored’ to wine (oinos), haliporphuros ‘sea-purple’ to both the sea (hals) and the murex (porphura) mollusks. Pound hits the same note through a quotation from Plotinus, drawn from a passage that specifically comments on nature’s ability to produce beings with theōria (contemplation) while it itself, some argue, does not have it and is, per Pound’s quote, “without logos and without phantasia.”Footnote ¹²⁰

The “dead words” the poet brings back into fashion refer both to the Plotinian adjectives (and the Homeric ones earlier), and also, I would argue, to the nouns that immediately precede them – that is, to the natural world. The point seems to be that these elements are not “aloga,” without logos in the sense of “irrational,” but that they do not need human speech (though, as Canto 95 had suggested, they may or should be read with a discerning eye and ear). Nature itself becomes the Aeschylean telegraph (“red wire”), replacing the initial Hermes–Kalypso–Odysseus gossip chain in the process. As Pound would later write in the “notes” for Canto 117 “et seq.,” “Let the wind speak / that is paradise”; the natural exceeds whatever “paradise” he himself may “have tried to write” (822).Footnote ¹²¹

Unsurprisingly, the blazing red wire delivers a vowel-rich Greek message, which is, moreover, immediately translated. In Pound’s particular transcription, we might not be surprised to find such a line in Elektra, in both sentiment and appearance. But in this canto Pound is chronologically proceeding forward through Greek, from antiquity (Homer, Sappho) through Late Antiquity (Plotinus) to the Middle Ages. This previously unidentified phrase is a mis-transcribed line from the Byzantine vernacular epic Digenis Akritis (hailed as the first text of modern Greek literature), where it refers to the intensity of positive erotic emotion rather than to Elektran despair. Pound’s notebook from late 1955–early 1956 contains notes on Digenis, including the line cited above, correctly copied in Greek:

Pound is hyperbolic but not incorrect in his translation. His source for Digenis, the Oxford Byzantinist and erstwhile English Review assistant editor John Mavrogordato, translates the full line as “[his heart is tamed], he would not live on earth” (4.258).Footnote ¹²³ The hero who speaks it, the half-Greek/Christian, half-Arab/Muslim Digenis, is likened by the anonymous Greek poet to a Siren, captivating the audience – who are in turn explicitly compared to Odysseus (4.260) – with his “melos” (4.261). Digenis’s song transmits to his beloved Eudokia the sentiment expressed in the phrase singled out by Pound; the line is repeated as a description of her reaction upon hearing and seeing him (4.274) – a fact registered by the “they” in Pound’s translation. Digenis and Eudokia’s musical and emotional reciprocity leads Pound to a vision of love qua transport or transcendence that is conspicuously absent in WT. Through the mediation of the deceptive song par excellence – that of the Sirens – the deceptions of that play, and even of the Odyssey itself (commemorated in the canto’s opening) are exorcised; a new Odysseus takes over and reaches love or, literally, “contentment” or “good will”– Eu-dokia.

More than Herakles or Odysseus, Digenis, whose name Mavrogordato translates as “Twyborn Borderer,” is the comparative hero whom Pound has sought: He combines East and West and, in this moment of singing, the human and the monstrous, the masculine and the feminine, and metatextually, the archaic and the medieval, the epic and the lyric, the learned and the vernacular, the historical and the mythic. Like Odysseus, he wants to go beyond the limiting confines of the known world, but perhaps unlike him, he is able, at least at this moment, to transfigure the deceptive and threatening Siren voice into one of mutual fulfillment, while Pound uses his favorite Greek vowels to (mis-)follow along. This small-scale harmony translates into a larger-scale one; for Digenis is also a man of action who, per Mavrogordato, is interested in and praised for his good government and whose great achievement is bringing peace to the Byzantine borderlands. Digenis and Eudokia, then, his song and their erōs, form the counterparts to the Eparch’s Book, the human and artistic side to its economic regulations; they offer proof of cosmic concord during that time period of the ninth/tenth centuries ce.Footnote ¹²⁴ Digenis Akritis is Odysseus’s path into historical modernity and thus represents for Pound the “volgar’ eloquio”: evidence of a living Greek tradition that he aspires to tap into so that his own epic can “bust out of the kosmos” that it has “pile[d] up” (to quote from the 1966 notebook with which I began) and into its long-forecast paradiso.

For it is this Greek, vernacular medieval Greek – the more immediate precursor of the modern Greek of Lorentzatos’s Cathay, which sparked, through WT, the renaissance of Pound’s poetic project – that the poet now feels he needs to learn:

This Greek is the “spark” of “accensio,” the thing that cannot be left out, the missing historical link between antiquity and modernity. From something like Digenis’s peaceful mediation of geographical, political, cultural, and temporal borders “is the Charta Magna” (1215) and its conciliatory statutes, which then inform Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England (1628–44), examined in detail by Pound in the final Thrones cantos (107–09). But, unlike H.D., Pound doesn’t want to learn Greek enough. His Digenis quotation, as recorded here, reveals that he is once again writing in one language. For the correct and not particularly obscure ζῆν (zēn) ‘live’ copied in his notebook, he writes ἔην (eēn), transcribed in Canto 102 as “EAEAN.” The form is doubly Homeric. ἔην ‘was’ appears in the very line from Book 2 excerpted in Canto 102’s beginning, where it had been elided by Pound: οἷος κεῖνος ἔην τελέσαι … (2.272; such a man was he to fulfill …). “EAEAN” is close to a transcription of ἐάαν, derived from ἐάω ‘suffer, permit, let,’ a form which appears in Odyssey 8.509, in the context of Demodokos’s song.Footnote ¹²⁵ If this change is intentional, Pound would be literally creating a twyborn epic language – a “mosaic,” to use Canto 105’s terms. He puts Homer’s words into the medieval epic and translates both at once. “Was” and “live” are roughly synonyms, while “suffer” could be the source of Pound’s hyperbole in “bu(r)st”: Digenis and Eudokia do not want to “suffer” the universe = they do not want to “be/live” in it = they want to bust out of it. (In neither case would the syntax and grammar work in Greek, but as Hugh Kenner first noted, Pound is always more interested in the Greek word rather than the phrase – “any mosaic.”) Two originals, one translation; this is the exact opposite of Elektra’s doubling. While H.D. will review her own life’s (Greek) work in Helen in Egypt in ways that recall Pound’s gathered currents in WT, and, like Pound, do so with dictionary in hand, the challenge she will set for herself is the opposite of that discernible in Pound’s late cantos: not coherence, not the one word, but the embrace of proliferating images.