BK. Ezra Pound

	A ‘version for Kitasono Katue, hoping he will use it on my dear old friend Miscio Ito, or take it to the Minoru if they can be persuaded to add to their repertoire’.

61. Trans., Women of Trachis, by Sophocles. Hudson Review 6 (1954): 487-523. Reprint, London: Faber & Faber, 1969.

Pound was declared unfit to stand trial and admitted to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane in December 1945. By 1946 he was writing again, though he devoted his energies to translation—producing The Confucian Analects (1949), this work, and The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954) before turning attention again to The Cantos in 1953 (see 63-65). Pound writes in a dedication that the work is a ‘version for Kitasono Katue [Ap, D29], hoping he will use it on my dear old friend Miscio Ito [Ap], or take it to the Minoru [see 82c1] if they can be persuaded to add to their repertoire’. Pound indicates later in an interview and in correspondence that he based the translation in part on nô principles (see 68, 78a, and 82c1). Following Fenollosa, he had equated the nô with the classical drama of Greece from as early as 1914 (see 13b), but particular similarities to nô structure are not readily apparent here. Passages are reprinted in the 1957 edition of 58. See also 156, 185, and 191.