Poppies, scarlet flowers, 'this beauty': H.D.'s Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis and the First World War.

Modernist poet H.D.'s experimental translation of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis (1916), published during WWI, shows H.D. pursuing this project to explore how wartime can provide opportunity for women to achieve extraordinary cultural authority in positions not generally afforded women, such as those of direct witness, storyteller and news-bringer, and heroic sacrificial victim. This translation project both registered and fostered the emergence of H.D.'s feminist queer thought about how 'New Women' of her time might come of age differently from women of generations past — through new narratives, new varieties of authority, and new forms of maturity. Finally, the essay complicates received ideas about H.D.'s 'pacifist' and critical stance on war, reading her translation choices as structured by an ambivalent fascination with both wartime 'beauty' and forms of advancement made distinctively possible for women by the circumstances of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]