Tatters & the Selvage Edge: A Palimpsestic Consideration of H.D.'s Poetics

. . . an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion . . .

—Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook

Previousness insists. My attraction to the palimpsest as a strategy of poetics lies in my interest to address diasporic conditions as states of superimposition. I hold the concept of palimpsest as means to speak of obscured or revealed substrata, to encounter previous matter both there and not there. 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.

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A palimpsest is “a parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing.” In other words, a palimpsest is a “multi-layered record.” The palimpsest is used as a metaphor, based on the concept of a multi-layered record produced by the layering of texts over time, to describe a surface (such as a medium) that has been reused, erased, or altered while retaining traces of its earlier form, or something having diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface. …  The nature of the palimpsest is two-fold; it preserves the distinctness of individual texts, while exposing the contamination of one by the other.

—"Palimpsest," from the Chicago School of Media Theory

As a poetics to encounter loss in the history of received narratives, palimpsestic poetics may begin to approach the experienced violence of rupture and address the loss and gaps that leave faded or whispered imprints. In other words, the palimpsest asks, what could it mean to work with the ghosts and tatters?

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Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater.
It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. 

—Walter Benjamin

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.

Sappho papyrus fragments

Remarkably, the lyrics of Sappho that H.D. chooses to translate—Fragments 113, 36, 40, 41, and 68—are perhaps the most fragmentary of the fragments. Furthermore, even when the fragments retain a relatively larger number of lines intact, H.D. tends to fragment them into smaller pieces by excising the original with ellipses and then extrapolates or extends those small pieces, prompting the aforementioned critical characterizations of her translation as creative refurbishings rather than genuine translations. In a sense, the problem of translating Sappho is similar to the one Jonathan Abel describes in his essay on The Tales of Genji; just like the case of The Tales of Genji, translations of Sappho too “disallow presumptions about translation that posits the translated as superior, sacred, and original” despite many translators’ claims of their intent to recapture the “original.” Translation has long been discussed in terms of loss—as Emily Apter states, it is one of the “primal truisms of translation” that “something is always lost in translation,” whereby the act of translation becomes synonymous with an act of compensation that is bound to fall short of the original—and Sappho literalizes this figurative loss that translation entails: her fragments represent the consummate absence of the very original that the translation is supposed to redeem. Given this literalized loss of the original, H.D.’s translation of Sappho effectively calls into question the conventional understanding of translation as a compensatory mechanism in which the translation somehow “makes up” for the illegibility of the original work; instead, it proposes a conception of translation as a creation— a creation of loss that gives birth to the original through signification of its privation, or a creation of “afterlife” that creates the life past.

— Toshiaki Komura, “Loss Created: H.D.’s Translation of Sappho’s Fragments”

So strong was the draw to palimpsest, H.D. named her 1926 autobiographic novel Palimpsest—writing as an occasion to scrape, rewrite, reveal, and write over.

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, in her essay “Mary-ing Isis and Mary Magdalene in ‘The Flowering of the Rod’: Revisioning and Healing Through Female-Centered Spirituality in H.D.’s Trilogy,” writes:

The palimpsest, as H.D. uses it in “The Flowering of the Rod” (1944), remakes reality by reconfiguring it. The palimpsestic design of Trilogy, the three-part epic poem of which “The Flowering of the Rod” is a part, offers healing through a revisioning of the world in feminist terms, created and represented by superimposed feminist characters and enacted by poetic language. This feminist use of the palimpsest effects healing and empowers women because it breaks with the traumatizing (for women) traditions that are imbued with masculine form and content. As a result, H.D. reclaims female types and reinvents them to form a new poetic template that counters the exclusion of women from master narratives and advocates healing from trauma. In short, H.D.’s palimpsestic design in Trilogy encourages the validation of a feminist worldview and ideology, thereby battling silence and fostering empowerment of women.

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What could the palimpsest look like purposed into writing for any writer or poet? I'm drawn into thinking of it as an alternative model to the collage. 

I take collage-writing to refer to pieces of language brought together with pasting and sequencing, a method that collects and gathers various pieces into new context-arrays, reworking language parts by parataxis, juxtaposition, and adjacency. In contrast, the image of a palimpsest relates to preexisting, layers that overlap, writing that begins with whole or partial shreds in elaboration, reworking, overwriting, or written newly or again. For me it invites a possibility of reimagining and recovery, as with removed layers that leave traces of what has been “scraped.” 

I think this is connected to my abiding interest in etymology, sounding through with difficulty, and the enduring pull of archetypes and myth. H.D. believed that “the poet does not give meaning to the word but draws meaning from it, touches meaning or participates in meaning there.”

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Photo of an exterior wall, layered, overlaid, scraped

In Adam Philips’s forward to the current edition of H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, he writes:

“My bat-like thought-wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight,” H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud, her moving memoir. Compelled by historical as well as personal crises, H.D. underwent therapy with Freud during 1933-34, as the streets of Vienna were littered with tokens dropped like confetti on the city stating “Hitler gives work,” “Hitler gives bread.” Having endured World War I, she was now gathering her resources to face the cataclysm she knew was approaching. The first part of the book, “Writing on the Wall,” was composed some ten years after H.D.’s stay in Vienna; the second part, “Advent,” is a journal she kept during her analysis. Revealed here in the poet’s crystal shard-like words and in Freud’s own letters (which comprise an appendix) is a remarkably tender and human portrait of the legendary Doctor in the twilight of his life. Time doubles back on itself, mingling past, present, and future in a visionary weave of dream, memory, and reflections.

What can it look like to make a poem or poems or series of poems where “time doubles back on itself, mingling past, present, and future in a visionary weave of dream, memory, and reflections”?

Photo of lovers' graffiti layers on walls of entrance to Juliet's house in Verona.

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From Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book:

The “we” in H.D. will always then be in part the choral consciousness of the Greek drama; the way “we” are a true folk, and our individual fates appear to us as if they were enacted upon a stage for our common sense as audience. There is an “I” each of us, as a member of a chorus of citizens, artists, or folk witnesses, has:

I crossed sand-hills.
I stand among the sea-drift before Aulis

a knowledge of the people. ‘‘At least H.D. has lived with these things since childhood,” Pound says in that letter to Harriet Monroe. And the chorus tells “what happened”; the myth, the hearsay, comes from them. The heroes or the participants in the great fate do not see the myth—what the hearsay tells. They are projections of what the chorus fears will happen.

But Iphigeneia commanding the chorus

            Stand silent, you Greeks. The fire kindles.

is also the inspired actor in the play. She is the genius, fired by the chorus, and thus hints go out of a likeness to the genius of the poem itself…

Robert Duncan also notes that H.D. “was not interested in the image as a thing in itself but in something ‘moving, whirling, drifting’.” Her writing reaches for multiples, for more than the singular voice or vantage. This may seem as an extension of or linked to her involvement with experimental film. Using the pseudonym Helga Doorn, H.D. co-starred with Paul Robeson and her lover Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) in Borderline (1930), an anti-racist, experimental silent film thought lost but recovered in 1970.  The film can be viewed here on YouTube (this upload transposes a contemporary sound track onto it, mute the sound for the original affect). Notable for its unconventional framing and editing, its “psychological themes and formal interest in Soviet filmmaking” gives form to the “image in motion.” Space and time distort into particulars both multiple and personal.

 …[as writers] we evoke a presence and presentation. We’re in a fabric of time and space. The imagination is trying to imagine and the great imagination addresses itself, as you do to a figure, to the presence of this fabric or what’s going on on the earth, and in that, it has full force.

—Robert Duncan

How might poets act as remember-ers in the phonological dimension of music’s soundings and rhythms?

To address palimpsest as we figure, poets can behave as trickster shape-shifters as they match their setting and times past, present, and future; arbitrate change; facilitate healing; and wing unexpected ways in that “sudden searchlight.”