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”
- Chapter 3 “What is Greece if you draw back?”
- Chapter 4 “Who fished the murex up?”
- Part III Tragedy and Translation in Late Modernism
- Part IV The Long Imagist Poem
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - “What is Greece if you draw back?”
Translating Hellenism into Modernism
from Part II - “I don’t want to write it”
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”
- Chapter 3 “What is Greece if you draw back?”
- Chapter 4 “Who fished the murex up?”
- Part III Tragedy and Translation in Late Modernism
- Part IV The Long Imagist Poem
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter studies H.D.’s translations of choruses from Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis (1915) and Hippolytus (1919). Tracing her shifting concern from image to sound, the author argues that her work mirrors Eliot’s and Pound’s preoccupations of that period; her play Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) – abstract and formalist, yet rooted in the specific circumstances of its time – especially reflects this. More specifically, she show that the “Choruses from Iphigeneia” are a first attempt to compose, on the one hand, a long Imagist poem and, on the other, to write a “poem including history.” She then homes in on H.D.’s treatment of Euripidean rhythm and meter in the Hippolytus plays, through which H.D. questions the relationship between “antiquity” and “modernity” as well as the possibility and value of writing poetry itself. H.D. engages with discourses on Greek antiquity, which are woven into her translations and play; unlike Pound and Eliot’s mostly rhetorical engagement, H.D. measures out in her work how to translate Greek poetics into English, and yet is almost as ambivalent as Pound about the value of Greek.
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- Modernist HellenismPound, Eliot, H.D., and the Translation of Greece, pp. 135 - 195Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024