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 6 - “Now time to go back to an effort of 1912”
Elektrifying English at St. Elizabeths
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 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focused on Sophocles – during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths after the Second World War; it examines his unpublished correspondence during this period as well as his also unpublished translation of the Sophoclean Elektra (1949).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.
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- Modernist HellenismPound, Eliot, H.D., and the Translation of Greece, pp. 285 - 326Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024