The ‘Wobbling’ Translation

Abstract

This paper focuses on the translations produced by one of the leading exponents of Imagism. H.D. was one of the few women writers in the early years of the 20th century to gain critical acceptance, and like her fellow writers of the Modernist period, she used translation to hone her poetic skills. This young American poet radically broke with the prevailing norms governing the transmission of the Classics, and her controversial and often brilliant translations of Euripides’ tragedies function as a site of poetic experimentation where the female poet can make her own presence as reader/translator/authoritative poet visible. This paper attempts to describe the context in which H.D. produced her translations, focusing specifically on the Modernist’s relationship with the Classics. It then examines H.D.’s translation of the first chorus of Euripides’ ‘Iphigeneia in Aulis’, published in the Poets’ Translation Series in 1915, a series which she edited with her husband Richard Aldington. This translation sees the poet both rehearsing her imagist poetics and claiming the right to intervene in and position herself within the line of classical transmission.