616
PARTISAN REVIEW
to laugh at the earlier versions and their hymn-tune lyrics, their throaty,
parliamentary neo-Elizabethanisms and Tennysonisms. We are more
tough-minded and less moralistic about the classics, and can see that
Deianeira is not what Mackail calls her in 1909, another Imogen or
Desdemona. She has fits of (justifiable) anger and self-pity, she informs
the chorus that one can get away with anything in the dark (597-8),
and prudently decides (630-2) not to send Herakles her love until she
knows whether or not he returns it. Our minds are little prepared for
thi~
grand Sophoclean homeliness of motive in so grim, austere and
elev(lted a play. But does Pound really right the balance by making
Deianeira talk like a cross between Tallulah Bankhead and Ma Kettle?
Pdund drops more than a fourth of this very terse drama. Why?
One speech of 37 lines is reduced to 29. Does he perhaps feel that
Sophocles is too prolix, or is he just eager to arrive at Herakles's "Splen–
dour, it all coheres" which he calls "the key phrase for which the play
exists ..."? It is good to have the play's intellectual action thus un–
derlined, but what
is
action in poetic drama if not the sum of every–
thing said, thought and felt, moods and tones as well as abstract demon–
strations of fate? Pound's Herakles is more bully than wounded bull.
And why should
U
Eurutou polin"
be' "Eurytusville" or
"aiai
ii
talas"
come out as "Gosh!"? This breeziness was fine in a mixed bag of lyrics
like the Confucian Odes; here it is overly apologetic and too self–
consciously endearing.
Still, if this isn't quite what Mr. Kenner says it is, "the first readable
twentieth-century version of a Greek play," it is certainly an interesting
assault on a magnificent and too-little-known work. Pound gives it a
driving emotional energy in the dialogue, a beauty and distinction in
the choric odes that delights even while throwing the whole thing off
balance.
What mournful case
who feared great ills to come,
New haste in mating threatening her home,
Who hark'd to reason in a foreign voice
Entangling her in ravage out of choice.
Tears green the cheek with bright dews
pouring down;
Who mourns apart, alone
Oncoming swiftness in
0'
erlowering fate
To show what wreck is nested in deceit.
R. W. Flint
