Book contents
- Modernist Hellenism
- Modernist Hellenism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Hellenists and Modernists
- Part II “I don’t want to write it”
- Part III Tragedy and Translation in Late Modernism
- Part IV The Long Imagist Poem
- Chapter 8 Pallinodes and Eidola
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 8 - Pallinodes and Eidola
“Catching up to the past” in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt
from Part IV - The Long Imagist Poem
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2024
- Modernist Hellenism
- Modernist Hellenism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Hellenists and Modernists
- Part II “I don’t want to write it”
- Part III Tragedy and Translation in Late Modernism
- Part IV The Long Imagist Poem
- Chapter 8 Pallinodes and Eidola
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961). While H.D. reviews her own life’s (Greek) work in her long poem in ways that recall Pound’s gathered currents in Women of Trachis, the challenge she sets herself is the opposite of that discernible in Pound’s late cantos: not coherence, but the embrace of proliferating images. The whole poem is an extended “hatching” of the Greek word eidolon ‘image, phantom, idol.’ The importance of the eidolon for H.D. has been previously recognized; the argument here differs in the specificity with which the author traces its lexical and conceptual translation throughout the poem. She reads the first part of Helen in Egypt both as a faithful and programmatic translation of Euripides’s Helen and as a revision of H.D.’s own previous writings on Helen. As with H.D.’s earlier translations, this one too catalyzes new writing: Helen in Egypt’s next two parts in subsequent years, where the Euripidean play’s import and relevance, as well as its unresolved tensions, are teased out. Helen in Egypt thus both performs and argues for the kind of approach to Greek here termed modernist hellenism: balancing freedom and constraint, “philology” and poetry.
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- Modernist HellenismPound, Eliot, H.D., and the Translation of Greece, pp. 393 - 463Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024