This doctoral thesis seeks to unravel the breadth and depth of H.D.’s lifelong
engagement with the plays of the Athenian dramatist Euripides. Though he is by no means
the only classical Greek author H.D. studies and translates during her career, I argue that
his dramatic oeuvre becomes an essential, multivalent source that helps her construct her
own poetic platform. The classical Modernist tendency to return to the past and translate
from the wide-ranging repertory of the classics, becomes a systematic and continuous
practice for H.D. Through her translations of Euripides’ plays that cover the time span of
1915-1956, she produces highly experimental renderings of choral odes, fragments, and
entire plays written by the Attic playwright. Simultaneously, she extends his plays beyond
the given generic realms of lyric, drama, and epic, while functioning in similar ways the
Greek Classical poets themselves worked within their own tradition. Thus, Euripides’
avant-gardism engenders and nurtures her own transgressive poetics.
Working progressively with lyric poetry, the first period of H.D.’s involvement
with Euripides evolves from a series of experimental choral and dramatic translations into
a systematic quest into several territories of ancient Greek literature and mythology. As her
translations acquire the freedom to become creative renderings borrowing from several
mythological realms such as the cycle of the Trojan War to Hippolytus and Ion, territories
on love, identity and autocthony, H.D. is challenged by the Iliadic epic and Helen,
allegedly the Causa Belli and victim of the Trojan War. In this thesis, I demonstrate how
H.D. exploits systematically Euripides’ radical interpretations of myth, poetic tropes such
as image, voice, the polyphonic choral voice, and intertextuality. Key texts for my
exploration are her partial translations of Iphigeneia in Aulis, Hippolytus, Hecuba, Electra-
Orestes, and The Bacchae, including her versions of Hippolytus, Ion, and Helen. Using as
interpretive tools a variety of classical scholarship and H.D. studies, I show how H.D.
constructs her own avant-garde, cross-generic texts such as the choral poem, prose-choros,
the critical essay, and the prose captions / interludes and how she uses them in her long
poems Hippolytus Temporizes, Euripides’ Ion, and Helen in Egypt. These new hybrid texts
simultaneously embody and expand the Euripidean drama while furthering her own
poetics.
(EN)
