Spectres of Euripides: Time, Translation and Modernism in H.D.’s Euripides

Abstract

The modernist period was one of intense engagement with antiquity. It was also a period concerned with radical ideas about time put forward by Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein that questioned traditional understandings of the relationship between past and present. This article considers these two aspects of the modernist period through H.D.’s translations of Euripides: it argues that H.D.’s equivocal position in literary modernism and the imagist movement (as demonstrated by her translations from Hippolytus), her prosodic experimentation with Greek verse forms in her translations from Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis and finally her emphasis on temporal themes in her Freud-inspired translation of Ion can be all read in such a way to cast new light on the complex temporalities of the translation of classical texts and the modernist reception of the classics.