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Tatters & the Selvage Edge: A Palimpsestic Consideration of H.D.'s Poetics
H.D.’s poems extend memory, life experience, and archetypes inside of the metaphor of palimpsest. Her translations of Sappho re-worked the remnants of Sappho’s lines, sometimes addressing the smallest lines in the original. The poem that results from her approach to Fragment 113—“Neither honey nor bee for me”—extend from it not as translation but as a trans-creation, both literalizing the loss of the original and creating a third possibility.
While H.D.’s poems made use of masks and speakers as/of characters from ancient Greece, she also translated Sappho—“re-workings” of her fragments from ancient Greek.
Like layers of wallpaper, parts solid and covered, parts in decay and tattered, the incompletion of the palimpsest become strategy to read, understand, and re-represent it to literalize the partial story, the story as and of fractures, and the multiplicity of experience.
