num_pages: 66
description: For Ezra Pound, Sophokles’  Women of Trachis  represented ’the highest peak of Greek sensibility registered in any of the plays that have come down to us…” Nothing rhetorical, nothing long-winded survives in Pound’s tragedy of Herakles. His language is lit with lights long extinguished in the traditionally ornate and airless verse translations. With no mincing, poetry speeds tragedy down its course to disaster. Pound’s version of  Women of Trachis  was first published by New Directions in 1957. Some twenty years earlier, in 1938, Pound had complained that there “were no translations of these plays that an aware man can read without deadly boredom.” He himself, as it turned out, supplied the his  Women of Trachis  brings Sophokles into the world of the living.
language: English
title: Women of Trachis: Play
titlecomplete: Women of Trachis: Play (Version by Ezra Pound)
characters: Hyllus, Heracles, Deianeira (wife of Heracles), Lichas
genres: Fiction, Plays, Theatre, Tragedy, Poetry, Drama, Ancient, Literature, Classics, Mythology
ratings_count: 2463
publisher: New Directions