This volume sheds new light on a wealth of early 20th-century engagement with literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity that significantly shaped the work of anglophone literary modernism. The essays spotlight 'translation, ' a concept the modernists themselves used to reckon with the Classics and to denote a range of different kinds of reception - from more literal to more liberal translation work, as well as forms of what contemporary reception studies would term 'adaptation', 'refiguration' and 'intervention.'
As the volume's essays reveal, modernist 'translations' of Classical texts crucially informed the innovations of many modernists and often themselves constituted modernist literary projects. Thus the volume responds to gaps in both Classical reception and Modernist studies: essays treat a comparatively understudied area in Classical reception by reviving work in a subfield of Modernist studies relatively inactive in recent decades but enjoying renewed attention through the recent work of contributors to this volume.
The volume's essays address work significantly informed by Classical materials, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Ovid, and Propertius, and approach a range of modernist writers: Pound and H.D., among the modernists best known for work engaging the Classics, as well as Cummings, Eliot, Joyce, Laura Riding, and Yeats
Author(s): Miranda Hickman ; Lynn Kozak
Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: xviii+270
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
FIGURES
CONTRIBUTORS
FOREWORD THE CLASSICS, MODERNISM AND TRANSLATION: A CONFLICTED HISTORY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Rationale
Modernist translations
Structure of the volume
CHAPTER 1 ‘SEEKING . . . BURIED BEAUTY’: THE POETS ’TRANSLATION SERIES
Selection of translators
The translations
Source texts
Form and content
Reviewers’ reactions
Conclusion
PART I EZRA POUND ON TRANSLATION
CHAPTER 2 OUT OF HOMER: GREEK IN POUND’S CANTOS
CHAPTER 3 TRANSLATING THE ODYSSEY: ANDREAS DIVUS, OLD ENGLISH AND EZRA POUND’S CANTO I
CHAPTER 4 TO TRANSLATE OR NOT TO TRANSLATE? POUND’S PROSODIC PROVOCATIONS IN HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY
RESPONDENT ESSAY 1 RINGING TRUE: POUNDIAN TRANSLATION AND POETIC MUSIC
PART II H.D.’S TRANSLATIONS OF EURIPIDES: GENRE, FORM, LEXICON
CHAPTER 5 TRANSLATION AS MYTHOPOESIS: H.D.’S HELEN IN EGYPT AS META-PALINODE
CHAPTER 6 REPRESSION, RENEWAL AND ‘THE RACE OF WOMEN’ IN H.D.’S ION
Speech and repression
H.D.’s feminist cultural critique
CHAPTER 7 BRAVING THE ELEMENTS: H.D. AND JEFFERS
Voice as strategic resistance
Strangenesses: acts of cognition as revelation
Beyond tragedy’s tower: Jeffers’ panoramic auditorium
Soundness, a salutary attitude of the depths
Chorus as inner mood curtain: they wore veils over their eyes
Writing from no place
Exodos
CHAPTER 8 REINVENTING EROS: H.D.’S TRANSLATION OF EURIPIDES’ HIPPOLYTUS
Defying eros ‘in vain’
‘Kupris/creator of all life’
‘how Kupris strikes’ / . . . ‘she incites all to evil’
Conclusion: ‘that most passionate of passions, the innate chastity of the young’
RESPONDENT ESSAY 2 H.D. AND EURIPIDES: GHOSTLY SUMMONING
PART III MODERNIST TRANSLATION AND POLITICAL ATTUNEMENTS
CHAPTER 9 ‘UNTRANSLATABLE’ WOMEN: LAURA RIDING’S CLASSICAL MODERNIST FICTION
CHAPTER 10 LOST AND FOUND IN TRANSLATION: THE GENESIS OF MODERNISM’S SIREN SONGS
Eliot and the genesis of classical modernism
Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ and the nightmare of history
Conclusion
CHAPTER 11 ‘TRYING TO READ ARISTOPHANE’: SWEENEY AGONISTES , RECEPTION AND RITUAL
‘A man of high seriousness’
Musical drama
A ritual plot
A new (old) form
The classics and the shock of the old
CHAPTER 12 ‘STRAIGHT TALK, STRAIGHT AS THE GREEK!’: IRELAND’S OEDIPUS AND THE MODERNISM OF W.B. YEATS
RESPONDENT ESSAY 3 MODERNIST TRANSLATIONS AND POLITICAL ATTUNEMENTS
CHAPTER 13 MODERNIST MIGRATIONS, PEDAGOGICAL ARENAS: TRANSLATING MODERNIST RECEPTION IN THE CLASSROOM AND GALLERY
‘Facing three ways’: H.D.’s Hermes and modernist migrations
Musings in the museum
Classical Convergences : myth, poetry and art in conversation
Sample convergence: Aphrodite
Migrations, translations, departures
AFTERWORD: MODERNISM GOING FORWARD
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
