Brilliant reworkings of Euripides' classic dramas by the great modernist
poet H.D., now available in one volume. H.D.'s 1927 adaptation of
Euripides's Hippolytus Temporizes and her 1937 translation of Ion
appeared midpoint in her career. These two verse dramas can both be
considered as freely adapted from plays by Euripides; they constitute a
commentary in action, and in this regard resemble the Oedipus plays of
W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound's Women of Trachis. In the first play, the
young man Hippolytus is obsessed with the virgin goddess Artemis and
discovers the depth of his passion with the sensual Phaedra, his
disguised stepmother: this experience brings self-knowledge and death.
The heroine Kreousa in Ion attempts to poison Ion when she fails to
recognize him as her son by Apollo and sees instead an outsider and
possible usurper of her throne. H.D.'s translations of the Greek were
greatly admired by T. S. Eliot. In her reworkings, she creates modern
versions of classic plays, enabling her to explore her favorite poetic
themes. Sigmund Freud (with whom H.D. was undergoing analysis just
before she embarked on Ion) commended her translations; and after
writing them, H.D. was able to go on to write Helen in Egypt, a
sweeping epic of healing and integration. These marvelous versions
attest to H.D.'s claim that the lines of this Greek poet (and all Greek
poets if we have but the clue) are today as vivid and as fresh as they
ever were.
