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Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound.

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First edition of Pound’s version of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, inscribed by the editor Denis Goacher to Geoffrey Bridson (1910–1980), who had co-produced the play for BBC radio in April 1954.

Sophocles’ tragedy narrates how Deianeira unwittingly poisoned her husband Heracles with the shirt of Nessus, believing it to carry a love charm that would win him back from the young and beautiful Iole.

Provenance:
The Manchester-born poet, journalist, and radio producer Douglas Geoffrey Bridson (1910–1980) was responsible for over 800 broadcasts during his career at the BBC, 1933–1969. In the mid-1960s he was known as ‘the cultural boss of the BBC’ in his role as Programme Editor for Arts, Sciences, and Documentaries. Although a poet of no small ability himself, it was his tireless and democratic promotion of modern British and American literature on the airwaves that led to correspondence and then friendship with nearly all the major literary figures of his day, many of whose works he brought to a wider audience through his radio productions.

The actor Denis Goacher, who had become Pound’s secretary in 1956, had played Heracles’ son Hyllus in the radio production – ‘I am so glad to have got Goacher for it’ wrote Pound in anticipation. Goacher afterwards arranged for the play’s publication, providing a foreword (pp. vii–xi) describing Pound during his confinement at St Elizabeth’s hospital, and an Editorial Declaration at the end, both attempting to redeem Pound from charges of fascist sympathies.

Pound and D.G. Bridson first crossed paths in the 1930s when Pound included a poem by Bridson in his Active Anthology (1933) – they corresponded at that time but they did not meet until 1951 when Bridson, now a force to reckoned with in BBC radio, came to Washington DC to visit Pound in his detention in St Elizabeth’s. ‘To me, Pound … was the greatest living poet’, Bridson later wrote in Prospero and Ariel. Bridson visited Pound again in 1956 to make some recordings, including ‘Four Steps’, Pound’s famous justification for his support of Mussolini; and then shot a television profile on Pound in Rapallo in 1959. They continued to meet and talk until 1963 as Pound lapsed slowly into silence.

Gallup A72a.

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