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
- Chapter 5 From Agamemnon to Herakles
- Chapter 6 “Now time to go back to an effort of 1912”
- Chapter 7 “From the dawn blaze to sunset”
- Part IV The Long Imagist Poem
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 7 - “From the dawn blaze to sunset”
The Languages of the Image
from Part III - Tragedy and Translation in Late Modernism
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
- Chapter 5 From Agamemnon to Herakles
- Chapter 6 “Now time to go back to an effort of 1912”
- Chapter 7 “From the dawn blaze to sunset”
- Part IV The Long Imagist Poem
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Modernist HellenismPound, Eliot, H.D., and the Translation of Greece, pp. 327 - 390Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024