ἤλεκτρον ‘amber’ is at the root of our “electricity.”Footnote ¹ The Greeks knew already that this fossilized resin, a substance with no fixed color or consistency, became charged with static electricity when rubbed, and thus it was considered a charm or talisman. The resin was produced by trees now extinct, so the very word ἤλεκτρον implies something we can no longer get to, but whose effects or fossilized products are still here; in this process of de- or re-composition, moreover, the resin has incorporated (thus preserved or killed) foreign bodies, parts of plants, or trapped insects. Amber then, ἤλεκτρον, Ἠλέκτρα perhaps, is the urn, containing material ashes, a kind of condensed body, but no “life.”Footnote ² Amber, however, gave life. Because it is found chiefly on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea but was much prized by Mediterranean cultures, amber was central to the development of prehistoric cross-European trade routes, as well as to the flourishing of Northern European communities. Ἤλεκτρον, Ἠλέκτρα, itself a foreign body, then, incorporated by the Mediterranean, historically produced what Pound might call “a current towards intercommunications”Footnote ³ – and he certainly was already aware of its symbolic powers in 1920, as my epigraph from Mauberley suggests.

Friedrich Schleiermacher argues that the translator may either bring the reader closer to the author or the author closer to the reader; if the two methods are mixed, however, the translator will have failed both the reader and the author since, Schleiermacher claims, we must be loyal to one language, as we are to one land, “or else hang disoriented in the unpleasant middle.”Footnote ⁴ This chapter will focus on such a disoriented translation, a companion to Eliot’s similarly disoriented Family Reunion: Pound’s posthumously published version of Sophocles’ Elektra (1949). Tracing the divergent path from his and Eliot’s early common interest in the Agamemnon that Pound took in this, his first sustained engagement with Greek tragedy, I will also examine the relevance of tragedy in his developing poetic work. As was the case with Eliot and the Quartets, tragedy remains critical in Pound’s conception and writing of his resumed long poem; Pound returns to the Agamemnon in Pisa near the end of the war, only to then reconfigure his struggles with that play in the Elektra four years later. Like Eliot and H.D., Pound uses the Greek play in order to think through both poetic-linguistic and ethical-political questions, all brought to the forefront because of the war. For Pound, tragedy becomes the cipher for a linguistic measure that would restore political measure: an attempt to get the words right (sinceritas) in order to form good government, as one of Pound’s favorite Confucian principles would have it.Footnote ⁵ What better way to electrify, to “‘[re]charge’ language with meaning” after the war than a translation of Elektra (LE 23)? Like fossils enclosed in amber, Greek words and meters and Greek symbols and religion are respectively maintained in Pound and Eliot’s Agamemnon-haunted English plays; yet in their authors’ later estimation, they do not succeed in sparking a cultural, political, or ethical renaissance.

Both The Family Reunion and Elektra are engaged with the question of (cultural) transmission, and of the relevance of the pattern of the past for the present. After recasting and deflecting the Agamemnon in Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot re-enters “the old house” in The Family Reunion but is at that time still somewhat attached to the anti-realist position on drama that he and Pound shared – insisting, for example, on the importance of the mediating function of the chorus and the resultant intensification of the action, as well as on its role in supporting the musical pattern of the play – to which he would later attribute his dissatisfaction with the play. Though, insofar as The Family Reunion is a modernization, Eliot definitely leans towards Schleiermacher’s first position – bringing the author closer to the reader – and takes a distant view of the Eumenides, indebted to Aeschylus’s structure and symbolism rather than the details of his Greek, there is still the “failure of adjustment” that blurs the clear perception of their relation (CP 7, 600). Pound, in contrast, refuses to make the choice outlined by Schleiermacher and settle the dispute between his source and target languages – just as he had wavered between directness and musicality in his earlier writings on Aeschylus. Instead, he seems intent on following, or rather forging, an in-between way of translation: He wants to remain faithful to the sound and rhythm of the Greek text, but also to the phonology of contemporary spoken English. It is the unfolding of this discord between two languages – at work perhaps in every translation, but forcefully and performatively brought to the surface in Pound’s Elektra (thus not allowing him to use the play to clarify his beliefs and so return to the writing of his “paradise”) – that I will be discussing in this chapter. Having set up Greek metrics as both a model and a challenge for English-language poetry early on in his writing career, Pound in his Elektra follows in the steps of H.D.’s Hippolytean meter madness of twenty years before, when she was also ambivalent about the usefulness and deployment of Greek poetics. It will take the more coherent and historically/culturally programmatic vision that prompts Women of Trachis – and is similar to that exhibited years before by H.D. in her Ion, as well as, more recently, by Eliot in his Cocktail Party – to lead Pound back towards the writing of the Cantos.

“Dead by this hand”: The Agamemnon in the Pisan Cantos

While Eliot’s Quartets move on from the Family Reunion-echoing “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker” to the Heraklean imagery of “Little Gidding” that will also later dominate Pound’s Women of Trachis and the Rock-Drill section of the Cantos, in the mid-1940s Agamemnon’s untranslated words come to haunt the Pisan Cantos. There they link more explicitly Pound’s longstanding concern with Greek poetics, especially as exemplified by tragedy, and his more recent political investments. By aligning Agamemnon with Mussolini, the Pisan Cantos first allow us to discern the relation between the translation project that will follow them – Sophocles’ Elektra – and the poetic-political project Pound is mourning; second, they enable us to read the Elektra as the degree zero for Pound’s return to writing after the war.

In his 1919 Aeschylus essay, Pound had not attempted to translate the chorus’s famous puns on Helen’s name.Footnote ⁶ Instead, that presumably untranslatable remainder is used in the early Cantos, where again the adjectives are not translated.Footnote ⁷ Pound nonetheless channels the Aeschylean gesture. In Canto 2 ἕλανδρος becomes “Eleanor” in a translingual pun that continues the Aeschylean idea of Helen as a historical force;Footnote ⁸ she is now aligned with the equally significant Eleanor of Aquitaine, even as Pound recalls the Iliadic Helen when “doom goes with her in walking” (2/6). That the other two adjectives (ἑλένα[υ]ς and ἑλέπτολις) are also provided in Greek characters, however, highlights the importance of sound in forging the connection. Helen indeed makes her early appearances in Western literature through “old men’s voices”: first in the teichoskopia of Iliad 3, then again in the Agamemnonic chorus, and now through Pound’s reproduction of those voices in Greek.Footnote ⁹ In Canto 7, it is ἑλένας that is skipped and replaced by “Eleanor,” followed by ἕλανδρος and ἑλέπτολις in Greek, and it is here that Pound draws explicit attention to Homer’s “Ear, ear for the sea-surge; / rattle of old men’s voices” (7/24) – exactly the two qualities (onomatopoetic melopoeia, living speech) that he had praised in his “Hellenist Series.” The historical force of the “doom” – literally, the law or themis – that Helen represents is contrasted with the waning but still audible power of these old men, including Homer perhaps, who have been superseded. Still the possibility of attunement to and faint survival of sound is key here. We next encounter “The old men’s voices, beneath the columns of false marble” (7/24); in contrast now to the architectural appropriations of antiquity, which remain in the realm of the imitative, the voices still resound because Homer captured them precisely. Similarly, the Aeschylean adjectives will all eventually make themselves heard even if they are converted into the terms of later times (e.g., “Eleanor”). By the time of the Usura canto (45; pub. 1937), however, the nature of Helen’s force has been specified, and she acquires a new Greek, non-Aeschylean adjective. The adjective sequence now appears transliterated and amended, and comes when the “I” claims to “have set down part / of The Evidence” (46/234) against usury: “helandros kai heleptolis kai helarxe. / Hic Geryon est. Hic hyperusura” (46/235). The destruction of ships (ἑλένα[υ]ς) turns into the destruction of the archē (“hel-arxe”): of order, of principle, of beginning. That is, Helen qua force disrupts the natural process of generation, just as Klytemnestra will in Pound’s Elektra. But, to convey this, Pound has to be parasitic on Aeschylus, going back to his archē and operating within or appropriating (a version of his) language in order to generate new, unauthorized puns in Greek. In 1915 Pound had distinguished between the two Renaissance Hellenists who appear at the end of the first canto by claiming that, unlike the precise yet sonorous Divus, the Cretan Georgius Dartona made the Greek language into an “excuse for more adjectives” (GB 114) – a fairly accurate description for what Pound himself is doing here. The Pisan Cantos vacillate between the two treatments of Aeschylean Greek evident in these earlier cantos: on the one hand embalming the untranslated remainder, and on the other attempting to convert the Agamemnon into an expression of Pound’s own contemporary concerns.

References to Aeschylus’s play in the Pisan Cantos point to exactly what Pound thought most translators failed to demonstrate: “the whole rush of the action, the whole wildness of Kassandra’s continual shrieking, the flash of the beacon fires burning unstinted wood” (LE 267). Canto 77 opens with references to Cocteau (the translator who succeeded) and ends with Kassandra, whose shrieks are the life that Pound’s stillborn translation had not been able to capture. The beginning of the following canto makes this sense of failure clear:

In Canto 82, this wordless “carrying to nowhere” is more explicitly explored, and more poignantly too, coming right on the heels of Canto 81’s libretto, and thus re-opening the question broached there of whether “What thou lov’st well remains” and “is thy true heritage” (81/540, 541). When Pound returns to the “beacon fires” at the end of Canto 82, he seems to challenge himself to finish transmitting what he could not more than twenty years before: “The news was quicker in Troy’s time / a match on Cnidos, a glow worm on Mitylene” (82/545).

Canto 81 prepares the ground for the Aeschylean eruption in 82, intertwining writing with mourning, and singing with doing. “Eso es luto, haw! / mi marido es muerto / (it is mourning, my husband is dead)” (537), we hear first in Spanish. But in this case, the poet is able to write on the surface of a woman’s mourning – “she gave me paper to write on / with a black border half an inch or more deep” (538) – the very paper (“eso,” “it”) denoting the emotion. In contrast, as Canto 82 will tell us, he will fail to write (on) her Greek counterpart’s non-mourning. As Canto 81 builds up to its climax, several Greek notes are hit. The canto first moves to consider ritualistic/local dancing traditions that have been preserved both in the world and as recorded by “Basil” [Bunting] and “Possum” (81/538), and then transcribes the ritual performed in Theocritus 2. That poem is another version of the attempt to “net” a husband or lover, the word ἐμὸν (emon) – present also in Klytemnestra’s declaration of Agamemnon’s murder – marking that possessive claim in Pound’s particular splicing of the quotation: Ἰυγξ … ἐμὸν ποτί δῶμα τὸν ἄνδρα (81/538; “Magic wheel, [draw] that man to my house”).Footnote ¹⁰ Unlike Klytemnestra, though, Theocritus’s Simaitha relies almost entirely on her words for success, casting a violent spell on her unfaithful lover Delphis. Pound highlights her effective language by eliding in his quotation the action that the wheel is asked to accomplish – ἕλκε τὺ τῆνον, “draw him.” The spell is already doing that by being uttered, thus rendering the verb superfluous. (In Canto 82, Pound will recall “old Ford’s conversation” which was “better, / consisting in res non verba” [545]). Greek echoes, then, seem to be necessary to summon the force necessary to (re-)“break the pentameter,” as indeed the past moments recalled in “A Visiting Card,” and Pound’s injunction to H.D. to “go back to an effort of 1912” would suggest. Though the canto’s famous refrain – “But to have done instead of not doing” (81/541) – may refer to a poetic/linguistic doing, an effective speech act rather than a merely physical act, its proximity to Simaitha’s similar doing (whose particular violence is not dwelled upon here) also inevitably brings it close to Klytemnestra. After all, the words that Pound usually relies on as shorthand for her murderous act (depicting both her decisiveness and the prized Greek concision) are “I did it. That’s how it is.” Yet, in the particular case of Klytemnestra, Pound did not do it, failed to come up with an effective language in which to translate Aeschylus’s play, which is why that remainder comes to haunt the beginning of the very next canto.

Canto 82 is organized around the image of the Aeschylean “TELegraph,” as Pound had it in his early translation – around the idea of transmission, personal and communal, intellectual and political. The first half focuses on the creation (or not) of a chain of tradition through personal communion between the living, while the second half shifts towards the establishment of a broader communion of song with both nature and the dead. At the same time, Canto 82 is also an attempt to do, to rewrite the Agamemnon itself. It interlaces several stories of female revenge: As Canto 81 intimated, the spell of Theocritus’s Simaitha is added onto Klytemnestra’s deadly hand, and onto both are added Philomel and Procne, who are also present in Aeschylus’s play (twice associated there with the un-carried Kassandra). Yet the canto tries to purge such female violence in two unexpected ways: first through Whitman, and second through a Harrisonian/Eliotic reframing of Agamemnon’s murder.

Canto 82 opens, like Agamemnon, with a (dog) vision from a distance (“When with his hunting dog I see a cloud”), and continues with an apocryphal story about Swinburne, fished out of a river while reciting Aeschylus, like an Agamemnon turning up alive after his bath:Footnote ¹¹

The Agamemnon “Opening” watchman’s “lak a dawg” is here spelled out properly – resignedly perhaps. Pound suggests through the ellipses his Agamemnon’s disintegration or incompletion, his own inability to move past the play’s opening and reach “the good job” – namely, the play’s culmination in Agamemnon’s death at Klytemnestra’s hand – except in a fragmented manner. The presence of Swinburne alerts us to the importance of sound, while that of Thomas Stanley’s Latin to his (Stanley’s) admiration for Aeschylus’s unusual “breviloquentia” in this particular line, which he heralds as a passage of “brief but effective statement”Footnote ¹² – the two pillars of Pound’s struggles with Aeschylus.

The words in capitalized Greek that follow are Klytemnestra’s (bold in the full version of the passage below):

Pound inserts another ellipsis, this time between Klytemnestra’s cited Greek words (my husband … of/by the hand), in order to leave out her deictic identification of her hand as “right” and of her husband as “dead.” The suppressed words in Greek are nonetheless picked up in Latin and English in the two lines that follow. The two translations offered, however, are not identical. The Latin, like the original Greek, identifies the murdering hand as the “right” one, while the English does not. This is not surprising: After all, the Latin “dextera” sounds more like the Greek δεξιᾶς (dexias) than “right” would, and like the Greek, does not conflate direction (right versus left) with justice. Yet the omission of “right” in English and of the full Greek distich suppresses Klytemnestra’s conviction that her act was more than “a good job” – it was the work not only of her right (δεξιᾶς) hand, but also of a just (δικαίας, dikaias) hand. In Greek, the alliteration of δ works to identify δεξιᾶς with δικαίας, right with just. Pound may replicate this evaded Greek alliteration interlingually through “dextera” and “dead,” but he ends up replacing the just act with its result: a dead body that remains unnamed. Unlike the Greek “hand,” which is multiply translated, the identifying reference to Agamemnon (ΕΜΟΣ ΠΟΣΙΣ, my husband) is untranslated. This enables Pound to blur the ancient story with that of another defeated general – namely, Mussolini, whose “tragic” murder opens the Pisan Cantos (74/445: “The enormous tragedy of the dream …”). Pound rehearses here on a small scale the two sometimes contradictory approaches that will characterize his translation of Elektra: extreme attention to the sounds and metrical movements of his Greek original (often rendered multilingually), and selective translation that highlights some aspects of the play while obscuring others.

Pound’s personal investment in this translation project is clear. The ambiguous English deictic in the final English version of the Greek quotation (“Dead by this hand”) might refer to both the speaker’s (Klytemnestra’s) avenging hand and to the poet’s writing hand. This suggests that Pound paradoxically still identifies with the murdering spouse and mother. The previously lamented poetic failure (the “carrying” of Kassandra and Agamemnon “to nowhere”) now becomes tantamount to personal political responsibility, the failure to translate (Agamemnon into English or, say, Mussolini into Jefferson) complicit in political collapse. Pound’s anxiety about carrying on a (Greek) poetic legacy appears in the canto right before the haunting paternal murder just discussed. The canto opens with a German greeting (“Guten Morgen,” 82/543), a variation of which had been addressed to Pound as father by his daughter in Canto 78; there it led to an indirect injunction to her to transfer forward, like Aeneas, the ancestral or paternal legacy, to remember the young Pound’s London years. Following the greeting in Canto 82, Pound establishes a chain of paternity or influence, depicting the figurative passing of the Greek torch from Landor to Swinburne to Watts-Dunton to Elkin Mathews, but not to himself:

Walter Savage Landor was the author of Imaginary Conversations with Greeks and Romans, and of a poetry collection titled Hellenics; young Swinburne had visited the older scholar in the last year of his life. Swinburne was a devoted reader and translator of Greek, especially compelled by Greek metrics. In his old age, Swinburne was cared for by Theodore Watts-Dunton. Elkin Mathews, Pound’s future publisher, visited Swinburne and his caretaker. Pound arrived in London in 1908, one year before Swinburne’s death, but failed to meet the master – a missed connection echoing Pound’s failure to connect with Aeschylus. Instead Pound found Mathews, who became his publisher and whose death in 1921 was one of Pound’s early (financial) traumas, to some extent overcome, at least psychologically, through writing the Malatesta cantos.Footnote ¹⁴ Of course, historical events in 1945 disrupted the validity of the Malatesta–Mussolini identification as “the central axis for the shape of his magnum opus.”Footnote ¹⁵ Pound’s subsequent turn to the Agamemnon in the canto encodes this poetic-political disruption in terms of translation. If Pound failed to record, bring to life, and then memorialize Agamemnon, will he able to do so for Mussolini? Or will he too be “dead by this hand”? The rest of the canto attempts to articulate an answer to this question, and fittingly, it is Malatesta’s court poet, Basinio, who enters the scene next: Unlike Pound with the Agamemnon and its untranslatable music, Basinio successfully recorded his master’s love for Isotta using “greek moulds in the margin” (82/544) to keep “his melodic sense active” (ABCR 48).

The transition between both the first and second halves of the canto’s opening transmission story, and between the transmission story itself and the threat posed to it by feminine violence is Dirce: a mythical figure killed by Antiope’s sons in revenge for her mistreatment of Antiope.Footnote ¹⁶ She is first recalled on the opening page: “But given what I know now I’d have / got thru it somehow … Dirce’s shade / or a blackjack” (82/543, Pound’s ellipses). The antecedent for “it” may be managing to meet Swinburne, or finishing/doing Aeschylus, who is about to be hauled out of the river with Swinburne. Landor, whose poem about Dirce occasions her mention, has been explicitly mentioned just above. The reference becomes even clearer when Dirce next appears in a slightly altered quotation from that poem – “With Dirce in one bark convey’d” (82/545) – which reads in full:

Dirce is granted the power of tempting the agent of death himself with love (hence Pound’s evocation of “(Cythera Cythera)” in the line directly above; 82/545), and more importantly, with the forgetting of both time and death, as suggested by the last line. It is this power of Dirce that Pound claims as his might-have-been weapon that would have allowed him access to the too-venerable Swinburne or, barring that, to the dead but potentially revivable Aeschylus. The poet’s wished-for alignment with Dirce contrasts, too, with his actual alignment with Klytemnestra’s murderous hand that follows a few lines below. When Dirce is re-evoked in the middle of the canto, it is still amidst signifiers of death: “the drill field,” the “8th day of September” suggesting the beginning of the harvest month, and finally “Terreus! Terreus!” (82/545). That it is Tereus who is recalled here, rather than the Swinburnian Itylus, comports with the canto’s prime concern: the murder of fathers. His name is what the birds “write … in their treble scale,” the additional r tying Tereus more closely to the earth (“terra”) despite his own avian nature and in contrast to the birds who can sing of him (82/545). But Dirce’s reappearance does signal a turning point in the canto, allowing the poet to re-articulate the hope that she might help convey him to a place other than the underworld, much as in Agamemnon Kassandra, envisioning herself in the Landoric Dirce’s position by “the steep banks of Acheron” (line 1161), wishes she were like the mythical nightingale.

From Dirce’s polysemic bark, tied, unlike Landor’s “boat,” to a mode of conveyance, an element of nature, and a sound, we move to the equally multifunctional Aeschylean burning wood – “The news was quicker in Troy’s time / a match on Cnidos, a glow worm on Mitylene” – and then to an apparent example of how now “the news is a long time moving / a long time in the arriving” (82/545):

Recalling his German instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, Pound transitions from the “exotic, still suspect” Greek drama to the “suspect” Whitman (“I have detested you long enough,” 1913’s “A Pact” reads [P&T, p. 269]) and thus returns us more forcefully to the formative period of 1912–16. We are not far from birds and trees here either. “It was you that broke the new wood,” the young Pound had conceded to Whitman, articulating his own task thus: “Now is a time for carving. / We have one sap and one root – / Let there be commerce between us” (P&T 269). It is that commerce that is taking place here, as Pound re-grows or re-gnaws the Whitmanic wood, unearthing yet another forefather and redressing an old wrong. The poem quoted here – “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” – is, as the excerpt above doesn’t quite convey, another bird poem. Its second line speaks of “the musical shuttle” “Out of the mocking-bird’s throat,” and its subject matter is a childhood memory fully re-experienced by the older man: “A man – yet by these tears a little boy again / … / A reminiscence sing.”Footnote ¹⁸ The “reminiscence” revolves both around the creation of a community of poetry/song through the experience of loss and through an imaginative act of translation, and around the emergence of the poet’s own voice – two very relevant motifs for this canto.

The memory opens on the boy watching two birds and “Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating” their song, presenting his version in italics in the body of the poem (389). When the female bird leaves and doesn’t return, the (translated) song becomes one of mourning: “He pour’d forth the meanings which I of all men know,” declares the poem’s speaker as he in a way replaces the male bird’s mate in this communion (389). Indeed, as the speaker “Listen’d long and long,” the relationship to the bird changes, and the latter becomes the poem’s addressee: “Listen’d, to keep, to sing, now translating the notes, / Following you my brother” (390). The male bird is given pride of place in the poem itself, his recorded first-person song subsuming the young poet’s for two pages. When his “aria sink[s]” at last, the speaker explicitly wonders, “Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? Or is it mostly to me?” (392). Pound’s quotation comes from the bird’s self-reflecting mourning song (as “translated” or ventriloquized by the speaker):

As his own song induces the male bird to sing more – deceiving himself that it is his companion he sees reflected in the sea – so his effect on the speaker is to start him “to life”: “A thousand warbling echoes … within me, never to die” (392). If seen through a gendered lens, the story becomes one of male bonding as catalyzed by female absence or loss, which fits in perfectly with Canto 82’s concern with a male tradition passed down, shown to be catalyzed by women “positively” (Dirce, whose murderous desires were after all trained on another woman and whose death is caused by two men tying her hair to all-too-symbolic bull’s horns) or negatively (Klytemnestra).

As Whitman’s poem expands its scope, though, the female principle returns in the guise of “the savage old mother, incessantly crying”; she is later identified with the sea and provides “the undertone” to the boy and bird’s “colloquy,” whispering “Death, death, death, death, death” (392, 393). By poem’s end, the speaker vows to combine the three notes: “I fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother / … / With the thousand responsive songs at random / My own songs awaked from that hour / And with them the key, the word up from the waves,” he declares (393–94). In the canto, however, Pound omits the mention of the sea in the line he quotes, and then replaces the Whitmanic appeal to a maritime feminine principle with “GEA TERRA” (82/546), to better tie the canto together with its Aeschylean undertext (see below) and to momentarily keep Whitman at bay. But he does continue his commerce with Whitman’s poem and his translation or transposition of its terms, staging his own dialogue between poet (his voice a tissue of quotations from earlier in life, a textual equivalent of the Whitmanic boy), natural powers, and bird. The earth (“ΧΘΟΝΟΣ [chthonos]”) quickly becomes “fluid … under the air’s solidity,” which is “strong as the undertow [instead of the Whitmanic “undertone”] / of the wave receding” (82/546). As the canto hits its concluding notes, this wave reveals the same as Whitman’s – “the loneliness of death came upon me” (82/547) – while the birds, halfway to being the angels of death, still sing.

Yet between the first reference to and final transfiguration of Whitman, we have also had a rewriting of Aeschylus via Theocritus and via Bion.

Prefacing Simaitha’s spliced Greek words by “wind” suggests first their conveyance, tying them to the Whitmanic he-bird’s song (“The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing”).Footnote ²⁰ Second, it points us to the moment in Theocritus’s poem where she places herself near the sea (again, like Whitman’s bird, and in relation to the water motif just introduced through the Po river) and draws a distinction between her tumultuous inner state and the quiet of the outer world: “Look, still is the sea and still are the breezes; but the pain in my heart is not still” (lines 38–39). Third, it aligns Simaitha with another quasi-sorceress, the misunderstood Kassandra (“the wind mad as Cassandra, / Who was as sane as the lot of ’em”; 77/495), essentially converting Simaitha’s professed turmoil into reason and aligning her with nature. The line that follows echoes in tone and structure the magical prescriptions Simaitha gives to her maid. She asks her, for example, to sprinkle barley grains into the fire and say that she is casting “the bones of Delphis” (line 21) therein, while her final instruction is to “take these [magic] herbs now and knead them over his threshold … and say in a whisper [or: spit], ‘I knead the bones of Delphis’” (59–62). But unlike Simaitha’s violent simulations, the instructions here seem curative – the herbs are tied to the abundance of spring, the bones carefully positioned instead of burnt or spat on – and lead towards one’s being embraced by a watery, receptive earth.

Earlier in the canto, Pound had quoted from Klytemnestra’s second speech after Agamemnon’s murder; he re-cites that moment here, with an inversion of word order and the addition of ἔφατα [ephata] ‘said.’ The word does not appear in the Agamemnon; in fact it is not even an extant form. Pound probably came up with it through Homer, where ἔφατ’ is used constantly to introduce speech (the elided vowel is ο not α). Whether or not Pound thought he was citing Aeschylus verbatim or whether this was meant to only refer back to his own canto where Klytemnestra/Pound has indeed already said those words, what he recalls and seeks to emphasize is Klytemnestra’s speech act, as if she too is casting a spell aiming to take possession of or transform her husband, just as Simaitha does in her spell a few lines above. There is in fact Aeschylean textual precedent for such a reading. Klytemnestra’s first speech after the murder includes the declaration which Pound had quoted/translated in the “Hellenist Series”: “I did it.”Footnote ²¹ So Pound is correct in thinking of her subsequent matter-of-fact reference to the “work” of her right hand as a repetition of something she has already said. In that first speech she recounts the murder play by play, ending with the third and final blow (which we have not heard about from Agamemnon himself since it’s the one that sends him to Hades, as Klytemnestra implies): “and when he had fallen I added a third stroke, in thanksgiving to the Zeus of the underworld” (literally, “Zeus down into the earth,” κατὰ χθονὸς [kata chthonos, lines 1385–87]). She then proceeds to describe something like a connubium terrae, as she likens herself being splattered by Agamemnon’s blood to a sown plant brought to flower by “Zeus-given” rain (1388–92). The suggestion of a fertilizing murder – made of course quite perversely by Klytemnestra here but taken somewhat seriously already in Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales” – leads Pound to connect the Agamemnon to chthonic rites, thus purging it of its wrongness.Footnote ²² The transformation of the mortal haima ‘blood’ into divine “ἸΧΩΡ [ichor]”Footnote ²³ is also rhetorically performed by Aeschylus’s Klytemnestra one hundred lines later, when she begins to construct her self-defense, claiming she committed a necessary act, both natural and god-mandated. She refers to “the thrice-fattened / spirit of this family” (1476–77), which nurtures a “lust to lick blood” (erōs haimatoloichos [1478]) that in turn creates “fresh suppuration” (neos ichor [1480]) before the older suffering even ends. She then suggests that she herself was only acting out the old curse, “adding a full-grown sacrificial victim to the young ones” (1504). It is easy to see how these accumulated references combine in Pound’s evocation of the overwhelming power of “fluid ΧΘΟΝΟΣ,” subsuming Klytemnestra’s act into that divine-natural process, in almost exactly the way that she herself says.Footnote ²⁴

To counteract this continuing identification with the “usuress,” and transform her dark vision into a lighter one – just as with Simaitha – a different, perhaps worthier, identity for the buried/sacrificed man is suggested. The husband (πόσις) here is not Agamemnon, the warlord naked in his bath murdered by his adulterous wife, but Niccolò d’Este laid to rest near a different body of water (“di qua di la del Po”), long after beheading his adulterous wife and her lover (who happened to be his own grown son, a stand-in for the cousin Aegisthu, blended perhaps with Iphigeneia). Unlike the warmonger Agamemnon, moreover, Niccolò is remembered by history, or at least by Pound’s poem, as urging his sons to keep the “peace” (20/95).

Finally, the transfiguration of the Simaitha–Klytemnestra stories is assisted by a third Greek intertext, one which uses the same words repeated here, and which is more explicitly and obviously related to the chthonic mysterium to which the poem has turned: Bion’s “Lament for Adonis” (1st/2nd c. BCE). This poem, long admired by Pound, depicts all of nature lamenting with Aphrodite the accidental death of her lover. Like Theocritus 2, Whitman’s bird song in “Out of the Cradle,” and even Pound’s own “Terreus Terreus” here, it too uses a refrain structure: “I wail for Adonis: ‘Fair Adonis is dead.’”Footnote ²⁵ Pound has already recalled “(Cythera Cythera)” in the opening of this second part of the poem, right before the mention of Dirce; though he frequently refers to her in her capacity as a local goddess,Footnote ²⁶ it may be especially significant here since Bion’s “Lament” constantly identifies Aphrodite through her place-names. Even the island of Cythera itself is quoted as sympathizing with the sadness of its deity. About halfway through the poem, Aphrodite speaks and accedes to Persephone taking τὸν ἐμὸν πόσιν (ton emon posin ‘my husband,’ line 54); her phrase links her to Simaitha’s ἐμὸν τὸν ἄνδρα and Klytemnestra’s πόσις ἐμός, both quoted by Pound in the passage above. Though she continues to mourn this good or handsome man (kalon andran) and his disappearance from her house (lines 29, 59), her sorrow is expressed in a less destructive way than that of the other two women. Rather than his blood allowing her to express her essence as an avenging spirit, as with Klytemnestra, her own tears are paralleled to it. Both liquids flow together to the earth (χθονί, chthoni) and generateFootnote ²⁷ flowers: The blood produces roses, the tears windflowers (lines 64–66). The poem ends by gesturing towards the cyclicality of this process of lament and potential rebirth: “Cease your wailing for today, Cytherea; stop your lamentations: you must lament again and weep [δακρῦσαι, dakrysai] again another year” (lines 97–98). The tone struck here is again quite different from Klytemnestra’s blood-licking eros as well as from Simaitha’s morbid spells. The Aphrodite–Adonis myth, as sung by Bion, thus works through specific images and turns of phrase to transmute the potentially darker and more threatening visions and actions of Simaitha and Klytemnestra.

While the opening of Canto 82 focuses on the construction of a live chain of transmission from Landor to Swinburne etc., in which Pound himself is revealed to have failed to participate, its ending focuses on remedying that “failure” by considering the possibilities of conveyance in or through absence and death – that reprise is suggested by the reappearance of Dirce. Pound moves from imagining that “I’d have / got thru it somehow” (82/543) to the certainty of postmortem transformation: “but I will come out of this knowing no one / neither they me” (82/546).Footnote ²⁸ Yet, as mentioned above, the poem ends more prosaically on the speaker’s surroundings, and on a Whitmanic note, shrinking back from its cosmic vision of the renewed earth just when its highest hope has been articulated:

Each word in these final lines is an accumulation of references. The “solemnity” of the notes may be attributed to mourning, or to the seriousness of the “mysterium” that has just been performed. The “wire” replaces both Dirce’s “bark” and the Aeschylean “match on Cnidos,” recalling of course Pound’s own earlier translation of the latter as “TELegraph,” and conveys the potential for transmission (especially by virtue of the birds) as well as Pound’s own entrapment.Footnote ²⁹ The clock striking three transformed into the birds’ three half notes echoes Whitman’s “trio” of bird, boy, and sea; Klytemnestra’s three murderous strikes; the three absent/dead husbands (Agamemnon, Simaitha’s Delphis, and Adonis, all now transformed, Tereus-like, into birds); and the canto’s three primary voices (Aeschylus, Whitman, Pound). The birds’ chests recall the Spanish widow’s black-rimmed paper from the previous canto (81/538), adding to the meaning of “note,” and become what he is writing “on.” Like Whitman, the poet here translates their cries bit by bit. Two potential candidates for the birds’ notes have appeared in Greek right above – a replica perhaps of Basinio’s Greek “tags” or “moulds” in the margins – with the white space between them acting as the third (both words are also trisyllabic): ἐντεῦθεν (enteuthen) refracted in “death,” δακρύων (dakryōn) in “downy.” Like Woolf’s birds, Pound’s birds are singing in Greek against or over or despite death, but the poet’s task is, like that of Whitman’s boy, to reimagine, indeed translate that perpetual song of loss (δάκρυα ἐντεῦθεν ‘tears henceforth’) into American poetry. Such a song would be at the same time the fulfillment of the Aeschylean play: the “carrying” of Kassandra who had wished to be like the nightingale, and the melopoetic answer to the refrain-like question asked by the Agamemnon chorus, ἰὼ ἰὼ βασιλεῦ βασιλεῦ, / πῶς σε δακρύσω; (“Ió, ió, my king, my king / how shall I weep for you?”; lines 1489–90, 1513–14). This re-articulation of the poetic mission through Whitman and Aeschylus lays the ground for some of the experiments in Elektra and beyond as Pound attempts again to bring light to the decaying or insensitive or “slow” America (represented here by the much-maligned educational system of his youth) that ignores its own luminaries even as they are recognized half a world away.Footnote ³⁰

Greek Studies at St. Elizabeths

The Agamemnon in the Pisan Cantos becomes shorthand and allegory for two intertwined injustices: the political one that befell a great leader at the hands of those supposedly closest to him, and the poetic one performed by the poet-translator who could not appropriately convey the greatness of both the person and of the crime against him. Canto 82 attempts to correct both but comes up against the reality of the Pisa camp “wire,” on the one hand, and the need to take into account American poetics, on the other. Given these investments in Greek articulated in the Pisan Cantos, it should come as no surprise that at St. Elizabeths Pound resumes with greater fervor the effort of going back to 1912 – as expressed in forging a(nother) new American poetics in relation to Greek. Now, though, it’s definitively “up Athens,” and not the Athens of Aeschylus, but that of Sophocles. As he would later write to H.D.,

Though the specific mode of approach – characterized by the tension between sound or meter, directness of speech, and centrality of the image – as well as the thematic focus (paternal or ancestral commands and their transmission, or not) remains consistent with his earliest dealings with tragedy during this “Elizabethan” period, what is different is the accompanying rhetoric. Pound is now a self-proclaimed hellenist, obsessed already in 1947 with the “urgent jo[b]” of creating either a reprint or a cheaper version of the Loeb series (with presumably different translation priorities).Footnote ³² Two years later Rudd Fleming, Pound’s collaborator on the Elektra, suggests that Pound views this as a new “‘movement’” – indeed one accompanied by a “Hellenists” manifesto, in another nod to 1912 – to promote the “renewal of Greek studies,” which he, however, cannot properly launch himself because of his incarceration.Footnote ³³

Mary Barnard – Pound’s wished-for substitute on matters of Greek quantitative meter – is one of the first correspondents to hear about his Greek plans at St. Elizabeths: In early April 1947, he writes to her, “readin’ ’em in gk. no use for what I meant. – must do whole series in eng. (Loeb Cl Lib) version = preferably in order indicated. Eur. Soph. Aesch. for what I mean.”Footnote ³⁴ “What he means” is unclear, though perhaps he is already thinking about the wider diffusion of the texts in translation. What becomes clear when he writes to her again a few days later is that he is not suggesting that she or the translator should not read Greek: “Answer futile till you report to me that you have read or ?re-read [sic] Odyssey, Euripides, Sophokles, Aeschylus. get Loeb edtn. translation with text facing. so if you know 8 words of gk. you can occasionally refer to.”Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, when the classicist at the University of Kansas Levi Robert Lind, who is recruited to the cause in May 1947, suggests that the reprint include only the translation, Dorothy Shakespear reports Pound’s objection: “He has put a large NO in pencil on yr. letter where you say the Greek could be dispensed with. The original is very important: the Greek particularly for sound, to any poet.”Footnote ³⁶ Barnard herself reluctantly follows his advice, but a year later she admits to not being sure “what this course of reading is supposed to do for me.”Footnote ³⁷ Pound urges her to “STICK out. Soph until you know something about his guts AND metres.”Footnote ³⁸

It is Pound, however, who is trying to understand Sophocles’ “guts and metres,” having apparently started the process about two years earlier with Euripides, just as he advised Barnard. In a brief undated note (probably late 1946), poet Charles Olson writes to Pound: “Euripedes [sic] & versification, eh? Wot say a third hand join you tomorrow. sit in. & catch the spill?”Footnote ³⁹ Olson’s notes on his visits with Pound shed additional light, clearly connecting Pound’s retrospective mood with his (re)turn to Greek: “The past retained – Pound reaching his capacity & wondering how much he has retained – 40 years … Pound’s insistence: study the Greek for versification, & leave the Greek vision alone – leave off the pagan business – not the Hellenic – H.D. did it.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Pound sees his own work at this time as complementary to H.D.’s earlier work: In his mind, she did the vision, the image, and he still has to do the sound. (By Women of Trachis, he would of course return to the question of vision.) We may also read into this statement Pound’s dissatisfaction with his own “pagan” ritualistic transformation of the Agamemnon in Canto 82.

Pound is serious about Greek sound. In early 1949, he embarks on a project of reading Greek tragedies with Rudd Fleming, a Classics professor at the University of Maryland, who visits him weekly at St. Elizabeths and eventually works with him on the Elektra translation. Fleming “practic[es] Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus aloud with the help of a recording machine,” and proposes that he and Pound together “read through a whole play.”Footnote ⁴¹ In February or March Pound writes a manifesto titled “Hellenists” – almost exclusively focused on matters of sound and metrics – which Fleming forwards, reporting to his correspondent Pound’s conviction that “singing Greek is the way to learn it.”Footnote ⁴² By March 18, the Elektra translation is well underway; as documented in Richard Reid’s edition, Pound wrote queries to Fleming in the margins of his own typed manuscript, to which Fleming responded in the margins of the fair copy of Pound’s translation that he himself had typed up – queries ranging from the precise tense and mood of a given verb, to the overall tone of a passage, to the irreconcilability of readings in Pound’s various editions. By June they have moved on to the Trachiniai, with Fleming reporting on June 6 that he is “still working on pronunciation of Trachiniae” with the help of a metronome. By August 6, he has received some “parts” of the play in Pound’s translation.

At the same time, Pound is slowly coming around to drama as a staged art form per se, in contrast to his skepticism about the theater as late as 1940 and his general treatment of Greek tragedy as a text to be read. This may reflect Fleming’s influence, for he and his wife would seek to stage Greek plays in non-traditional spaces (“in the open” or on an island in the Potomac), which impressed Pound.Footnote ⁴³ Indeed, he seems to be exploring in the Elektra a possibility broached but not pursued in the 1919 essay on Aeschylus – namely that what doesn’t work in an English “reading version” might nonetheless “be of true service only if the English were actually to be sung on a stage, or chanted to the movements of the choric dance or procession” (LE 273). Pound’s notes in the typed Elektra manuscript indicate that he fully expected the play to be accompanied by music, and that his chorus would dance, though he still insisted on the subordination of these elements to the words: “Modification of speech MINIMUM or NONE for the sung parts … When danced, the foot-beat must be indicated BY the words, from them to the tune” (Elek 103). He even blames the non-appearance of Elektra to the delay in getting the music.Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, as soon as he suggests that the way to understanding Greek is through singing, he also recalls the 1916 connection with the Noh: “can it be sung on stage … it has taken several centuries to evolve Noh; we dont expect to perfect Greek-plus-Noh criteria in three weeks, but a LOT of people must try, and start NOW.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Fleming writes to a Mr. Trova, who has made mask drawings for the Elektra that Pound is “enthusiastic” about, and gives him further instructions on actually making the masks, claiming that they are “pushing toward a production of Pound’s translation.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In late 1949/early 1950, Pound is seeking sound-films of the Noh because, as Dorothy reports, he is “convinced that there can be no fit performance of greek drama until the technique of the Noh stage is understood.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Though the intense collaboration with Fleming seems to abate by 1950, Pound continues to immerse himself in and proselytize for Greek. He is especially eager to get the erstwhile hellenist imagists on board. Already in June and July 1949, he is asking H.D. if anyone, including herself, has written “a word of sense re/ Σοφοκλες [sic]” and whether she has “looked @ the Trachiniai lately.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Throughout 1951, he crows to Aldington about the Flemings’ successful staging of Seven against Thebes and prods him to “go on wiff yr/ gk/ drammerers”; correctly recalling his work on Alcestis in the late 1920s and his plan then to translate a series of tragedies, Pound has a “mild urge” to know what he may be translating now, since there is “No use everbuddy woiking on the SAME drammer.”Footnote ⁴⁹ To both Aldington and H.D. he repeatedly describes visits by a “Gang of gks. here who dance instead of teaparty” – a jab perhaps at Eliot’s versions of Greek tragedy – and, while amused by their bumbling attempts to sing Aeschylean choruses, he also reports on his own serious study of Greek prosody: “I got right mode – Byzant. Trad. + several seeeeryusly workin’ on metre to sing + Xoi. to dance.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Pound’s newfound hellenism also takes some more unexpected turns as he begins to delve into Greek specifics, attempting to distance himself from the rhetoric he had imbibed in his earlier years. Tellingly, it is in letters to H.D. that he explores it. In late 1949, just as he is actively working on the plays, he turns to Pausanias – again, a territory to which H.D. beat him thirty years before. Responding to his suggestion to read Pausanias,Footnote ⁵¹ H.D. recaps her earlier work on the Greek writer and seeks to maintain her distance:

This account reflects where H.D. is at that moment, having completed her Second World War novels, to which she also refers. At the same time, there is an undertone of resistance to Pound’s pounding didacticism – that is what he himself perceives. Still eager to pull her back to Greece now that he has returned to it, he writes in a quick but telling note on January 7, 1950:

In a nod to H.D.’s own imagining of Eurydice – in one of those poems that were published almost side by side with Pound’s Fontenelle dialogues in the Egoist in 1917Footnote ⁵⁴ – as an unwilling follower of Orpheus, Pound casts himself in the part nonetheless. But he acknowledges that it is he who needs her help, in his attempt to “know enough gk.” Given the question that follows, it is clear that his statement is not meant to be an evocation of the “chasm” Woolf spoke of, or an Eliotic linguistic surrender, but a desire to find other ways of knowing it, to bridge the gap. As in the Elektra he is interested in the physicality of sound, so with Pausanias he is interested in the tangibility of Greece. Can landscape be used to forge a real, a physical connection between past and present? And has Pausanias’s writing actually managed to capture a record of place?

When a year later Pound sends H.D. an account of an excavation in Samothrace that uncovered the famed Victory statue’s right hand, it is because it details the archaeologists’ new approach along similar lines. “Despite the fact that much of the terrain in which we were working had supposedly been covered by previous excavators,” one of the participants writes, they were able to make their discovery because, unlike their predecessors, they tried to visualize the statue’s setting and the sacred precinct’s geography.Footnote ⁵⁵ It was a similar new excavation in well-worn terrain that Pound himself had undertaken in his Sophocles translations, and the help in recovering Sophocles’ missing hand – or ear – would come from Swinburne. Though in December 1951 he describes his “complete overhaul of klassik studies” to Aldington using roughly the terms of 1919 (“cut out + use parts that really TELL reader something”),Footnote ⁵⁶ the letters that follow all revolve around Swinburne and the unfinished hellenist project of the early 1910s. Pound links Swinburne’s Greek studies with his poetic ability: “note how much better a poet Swinburne is, than is generly sposed. See how much he gets merely by shift of word from cliché order, as per/ brown, bright,” he tells Aldington.Footnote ⁵⁷ The line praised is from the first chorus of Swinburne’s attempted Greek tragedy Atalanta in Calydon: “And the brown bright nightingale amorous / Is half assuaged for Itylus, / For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, / The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The connection Pound implicitly draws here is between being a better poet and adequately translating or transposing Greek (sound) so that its song half-survives despite or even without the pain caused by foreign violations. With his own work with untranslated Greek in the Elektra probably in mind, he now describes his Loeb plan thus: “shd/ like see a proper portable of ten or 20 vols/ klassiks, not necessaril [sic] all translated” (my emphasis).Footnote ⁵⁹ A few weeks later, he makes the link between the evolution of modern poetry and Greek even clearer: “technical advance probable from Athens to Alexandria (Callimachus, Theoc/) BUT NO serious attempt to go on FROM Algy and get an eng/ idiom that wd/ serve.”Footnote ⁶⁰ While Pound himself will remain mired in “Athens” – namely Swinburnian sound in his analogy – it is H.D. who is assigned the task. On February 28, 1953, he announces to Aldington that he will be sending her Callimachus to translate.Footnote ⁶¹ She does not, but is perhaps spurred or encouraged by Pound’s entreaties to continue her own Greek studies of Helen later that year.

“Guts and metres”: Pound’s Elektra