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 essay addresses the role of Greece in Edith Wharton’s representation of home as a topos of strong human and cultural bonds. While Wharton saw France as the epitome of this ideal, she found in Greece its most symbolic expression, one that she identified in The Odyssey and later developed into a narrative of cultural wandering and triumphant return. The essay examines Homeric-inspired tropes of wandering and return in The House of Mirth (1905) and The Children (1928), as well as non-fictional works, such as Wharton’s diary of the 1888 Vanadis cruise. Using archival resources, including Wharton’s undated poem “Penelope” and her impressions from the 1926 visit to Greece on the steam yacht Osprey, I argue that Wharton conceptualized Greece not only as the ancient cradle of Western civilization but also as a paradigm of cultural recovery and the antidote to modern forms of alienation and drift.