Abstract
In the “Translator’s Postscript” to his 1922 rendering of Rémy de Gourmont’s treatise on sex, the Physique de l’Amour, Ezra Pound offers one of his most infamous speculations about the evolution of human creativity:
It is more than likely that the brain is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid. … This hypothesis. . . would explain the enormous content of the brain as maker or presenter of images. … I offer an idea rather than an argument, yet if we consider that the power of the spermatozoide is precisely that of exteriorizing a form, and if we consider the lack of any known substance in nature capable of growing into brain, we are left with only one surprise, or rather one conclusion, namely, in the face of the smallness of the average brain’s activity, we must conclude that the spermatozoic substance must have greatly atrophied in its change from the lactic to coagulated and hereditarily coagulated conditions… There are traces of [this idea] in the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head-on, the female chaos. Integrations of the male in the male organ. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.
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Notes
“Translator’s Postscript,” from Rémy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love, trans. Ezra Pound. 1922. (New York: Collier, 1961), pp. 149–150.
For a comprehensive survey of the superstition regarding the brain/sperm connection, see Weston La Barre, Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 1 The War of the Words (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 141.
Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 20.
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)
Bonnie Kime Scott, ed. The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
Lisa Rado, ed. Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism (New York: Garland, 1994)
Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson, eds., Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997)
Ann Douglass, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1988).
Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 253.
Amy Lowell, The Complete Works of Amy Lowell, ed. Louis Untermeyer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), p. 459.
Ezra Pound, “Sage Homme,” The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, 1950), p. 170.
For an interesting discussion of the dynamics of the Pound-Eliot interaction in the composition of The Waste Land, see Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989).
T. E. Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” in Further Speculations, ed. Samuel Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. 69.
Eileen Gregory, H. D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 55.
For a discussion of H. D.’s novels, see Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.’s Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
For a brief selection of H. D.’s critical writings, see the H. D. section in Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
For H. D.’s engagement with film, see Anne Friedberg, “Approaching Borderline” in H. D.: Woman and Poet. Michael King, ed. (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1986), pp. 369–90.
For her engagement with the filmic technique of montage, see Susan Edmunds, Out of Line: History, Psychoanalysis, and Montage in H. D.’s Long Poems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
Finally, for a discussion of H. D. in the context of modernist visionary poetry, see Helen Sword, Engendering Inspiration: Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H. D. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937, 1969), p. 498.
Richmond Lattimore, “Euripides as Lyrist,” Poetry Vol. LI, No. III (Dec. 1937), p. 163.
D. S. Carne-Ross, “Translation and Transposition,” in The Craft and Context of Translation, eds. William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck (Austin: Humanities Research Center-University of Texas Press, 1961), pp. 3–31, esp. p. 7.
Vincent Quinn, Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) (New York: Twayne, 1967), p. 95.
For Martz’s essay, see Louis L. Martz, Introduction, H. D.: The Collected Poems, 1912–1944 (New York: New Directions, 1983), esp. pp. xvi–xxiv.
For Duplessis’s, see H. D. : The Career of that Struggle (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986), esp. pp. 23–26.
For Susan Gubar’s article, see “Sapphistries.” Signs 10 (Autumn 1984): 43–62.
Finally, Diana Collecott has taken up these earlier strands and woven them into a complete study of H. D.’s relationship with Sappho in H. D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910–1950 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Eileen Gregory, H. D., and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
As cited in Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931), p. 110.
For a detailed reconstruction of H. D.’s contribution to the founding of Imagism, see Cyrena Pondrom, “H. D. and the Origins of Imagism” originally appearing in Sagetrieb 4 (Spring 1985): 73–100
Gregory also notes that H. D. used J. W. Mackail’s Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, J. W. Mackail, ed. and trans. (New York: Longmans, 1911). Gregory p. 56.
For more information on this collaborative episode, see Caroline Zilboorg, “Joint Venture: Richard Aldington, H. D. and the Poets’ Translation Series” Philological Quarterly 70 (Winter 1991): 67–98.
See also Robert Babcock, “Verses, Translation, and Reflections from ‘The Anthology’: H. D., Ezra Pound and the Greek Anthology.” Sagetrieb 14 (Spring-Fall 1995): 201–16.
For a view representative of the standard masculinist critical evaluations of H. D. and her reputation as a strictly Imagist poet, see Brendan Jackson, “‘The Fulsome-ness of her Prolixity’: Reflections on H. D., ‘Imagiste.’” The South Atlantic Quarterly 83:1 (Winter, 1984): 91–102.
Rachel Blau Duplessis, “Romantic Thralldom in H. D.”, originally published in Contemporary Literature XX, Vol. 2 (Spring, 1979): 178–203
T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1920), p. 74.
The scholarship on this issue is too massive to recapitulate in detail here, but for an introductory anthology of the works of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigary, Monique Wittig, and Julia Kristeva, see New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980).
For a relatively recent consideration of the relationship between gender and lyric in Modernism, see Rachel Blau Duplessis, “‘The Corpses of Poesy’: Some Modern Poets and Some Gender Ideologies of Lyric,” in Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, eds., Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
For example, in the Loeb Classical Library edition, A. T. Murray begins the epic with mention of the bard: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, driven far astray after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.” The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 13.
Similarly Richmond Lattimore gives the opening as “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven/far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.” Richmond Lattimore, trans., The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965, 1967), p. 27.
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© 2002 Steven G. Yao
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Yao, S.G. (2002). “from Greece into Egypt”: Translation and the Engendering of H. D.’s Poetry. In: Translation and the Languages of Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05979-6_4
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