Mary Barnard, American Imagist

Chapter Three: “A Would-Be Sappho

59 Chapter Three “A Would-Be Sappho” 3.1 Sappho and the Imagists In the sawmills and the seashore Barnard found her style as well as her subject ; not only were the grains of sand at Ocean Park and the sawmill clearings beyond a north window hard examples of the kind of localized specifics demanded by American modernism, they were also physical and geographical expressions of the kind of spare plainness to be found in the Japanese haiku form or Sappho’s fragments that Pound and other Imagists had sought to find equivalents for in Anglo-American verse as they revolted against the “doughy mess” of “the common verse . . . from 1890.” Such links between Barnard’s local and Sappho’s fragments were not to go unnoticed when she finally published the “good thing” of her Sappho translation in 1958, as the poet David Gordon observed: “The firm, unadorned, and . . . (‘polished exact’) idiom that Barnard brings to her remarkable translation of Sappho may be related to the ‘frontier town’ (stoic spareness, high spirits, grit) of her childhood, and tempered by the ‘dustbowl’ and the Great Depression of 1929.”1 Gordon was perhaps unaware of just how prescient a statement this was; the new Barnard archives pinpoint Barnard’s obsession with Sappho at the beginning of the Depression years and her attempt to emulate Pound’s example. Following a grilling of her latest manuscript one October day in 1930 by Lloyd Reynolds, the Reed tutor who had introduced her to the “real moderns,” Barnard relayed the diagnosis to her mother and signed her letter off with a rather curious moniker. “He said I should study for greater subtlety of rhythm . . . greater ‘intensification’ . . . and, to some extent, clearer images,” she wrote, before scribbling “a Would-Be Sappho.”2 Time would tell that Barnard would one day write and “be” Sappho in her 1958 translation, but not before her late Imagism had extensively 60 / Mary Barnard, American Imagist engaged with Sappho’s poetry, both as part of her apprenticeship in prosody, as the next chapter explores, and as part of her American modernist project to “make it new” for the nation, as the present chapter does. In a way, Barnard was doing just as her Imagist forebears had done: finding a “spare but musical” voice through the appropriation of an exemplar in the mode. And yet, ironically, Barnard managed to draw out of her “Sappho connection ” a thoroughly American “shriek of defiance,” as well as a best-selling text that would trigger an outpouring of classical translations by Americans. In order to see precisely how Barnard managed this remarkable feat of spinning distinctively “new” American lyrics from some of the oldest European lyrics in existence without kowtowing to “the European,” we need to spend a little time revisiting Sappho’s impact on those earlier Imagists to see why this particular Greek poet mattered so much in the first place. “It all began with Greek fragments,”3 H.D. had said in End to Torment . She could have been speaking for her lovers as much as for herself, for Pound, Richard Aldington, and H.D. discovered Sappho around the same time that they were discovering both themselves and each other, buoyed by the major recovery of Sappho’s corpus, which ran, rather tantalizingly, alongside the personal and creative emergences of these three poets caught up together in a triangle by turns erotic and aesthetic. In 1885, the year of Pound’s birth and one year before H.D’s, Henry Thornton Wharton published Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation, the first comprehensive book of Sappho’s lyrics in English, including translations by the Greek scholar John Addington Symonds. In 1901, Pound and H.D. met at a Halloween party. Both would go on to read and draw upon Wharton’s text, as would Barnard after them, a text which enjoyed renewed popularity in 1902 when a manuscript of Sappho’s work was discovered among the sandy rubbish tips of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Taken to Berlin for preservation by scholars from a nation that had churned out more than twenty new editions and translations between the 1770s and the 1850s, the aptly named “Berlin Parchment” was quickly seized by translators.4 A French edition appeared in 1903, while Pound was still in college.5 The English edition arrived in England the year after Pound did, having published his first collection, A Lume Spento, in 1908. In 1909, J. M. Edmonds began publishing his...