This chapter claims that Pound’s reconfiguration of Sophocles’s Trachiniai as a Noh play works towards the realization of the dream of the long Imagist poem that coheres (first articulated in 1916), enabling Pound to return to the writing of the Cantos – much as H.D.’s translation of Ion in the 1930s had allowed her to return to writing and led to Trilogy. Pound’s Women of Trachis offers a condensed image not only of the play which it translates, but also of Pound’s own body of work up to that time. Yet the translation also undercuts the triumphant narrative it seems to present, an undercutting that the soon-to-be-composed late Cantos will seek to refute. Section: Rock-Drill and Thrones recruit first other tragedies to balance and further clarify the relation between poetics and politics that remain ambivalent in the Sophocles translations, and then pre- and post-Athenian Greek texts that, in Pound’s excerpting, seem to harness the Greek language towards a monosemic vision dictated by Pound’s politics. The Trachinian Herakles himself has to be further translated into other mythical figures in the Cantos in order for the promise he represents to be fulfilled.

This chapter tracks Pound’s plunge into Greek studies – especially focused on Sophocles – during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths after the Second World War; it examines his unpublished correspondence during this period as well as his also unpublished translation of the Sophoclean Elektra (1949). An opening reading of the Pisan Cantos (wr. 1945) argues that Pound explicitly ties the fate of his epic poem, and of American poetry tout court, to a re-engagement with Greek, and especially tragic, poetics. The bilingualism of his Elektra – the play is half in English, half in transliterated Greek – encodes its antithetical ambitions, one poetic and the other political, as Pound uses the translation on the one hand to devise a new prosody for his writing after the war, returning to the prosodic experiments of his early years, and on the other, to continue the fascist ghost theater of the Pisan Cantos.

Chapter 1 expands on the Introduction’s brief exploration of Norbert Wiener’s theories alongside modernist literary aesthetics to argue that Ezra Pound’s Cantos and radio broadcasts employ the logic of cybernetic feedback as a pedagogical model for teaching twentieth-century readers how to negotiate large quantities of data, find meaningful patterns within messages from the past, and adapt their conduct to best achieve their goals. Elucidating arguments that Pound makes in his radio broadcasts and poetry (particularly the Chinese History Cantos) and comparing them to Wiener’s mid-century theories of cybernetic feedback, Love challenges the critical tendency to compare Pound’s work to unidirectional radio transmission. Instead, the chapter’s analyses illustrate that Pound champions the principle of circulation and positions his readers as cybernetic machines, inviting them to learn from the feedback loops that circulate throughout history, culture, and language.