HD

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Hilda Doolittle , better known by her initials HD (born September 10, 1886 in Bethlehem , Pennsylvania , † September 27, 1961 in Zurich , Switzerland) was an American writer .

Life

Memorial plaque on apartment building 44 Mecklenburgh Square in London

Doolittle toured Europe and did not return to the United States after 1911 . She settled in London , where she married the English writer Richard Aldington in 1913 . He had affairs and the couple soon became estranged (divorced in 1937). On March 31, 1919, their daughter Frances Perdita Aldington was born, whose father was the painter Cecil Gray. A new friend, the British writer and wealthy heiress Bryher (actually Winifred Ellerman ) took in the mother and daughter who had the Spanish flu during pregnancy . HD survived the pandemicand called Bryher, who was close to suicide at the time, her lifesaver. HD remained Bryher's partner until his death.

Perdita grew up with her mother, her lover Bryher and Bryher's respective husband (from 1921 Robert McAlmon , from 1927 Kenneth Macpherson ) on. The unusual family situation was made even more complicated by the fact that Bryher's husband, Macpherson, was a lover of bisexual HD, and Bryher Perdita used his own eccentric homeschooling methods. In 1928 Bryher and Macpherson adopted Perdita. From 1929 HD lived with Bryher, her mother, her husband Macpherson and Perdita first in Territet on Lake Geneva , then mostly in Bryher's villa Kenwin in La Tour-de-Peilz near Vevey. In 1933 HD moved to Vienna to be treated by Sigmund Freud . Based on this experience, she published the book Tribute to Freud in 1943 .

The literary magazine Life and Letters Today published by Bryher published , among other things, the poems of HD. In 1930, Bryher and her husband produced the experimental film Borderline with Paul Robeson and HD in the leading roles.

Hilda Doolittle died on September 27, 1961 at the Hirslanden Clinic in Zurich at the age of 75 .

plant

A large part of her literary work are translations from Greek and their free editing. In doing so, she was influenced not only by her husband Aldington, but also by the other imagists , whom she soon joined. She was particularly encouraged by Ezra Pound . In her autobiographical novel Bid me to live , she soberly addresses the breakup of her marriage.

Works

(Selection)

  • By Avon River , 1955
  • Bid Me to Live , 1960
  • Collected Poems of HD 1925
  • The Flowering of the Rod , 1946
  • Heliodora and Other Poems , 1924
  • Hippolytus Temporizes , 1927
  • Hymen , 1921
  • Palimpsest , 1926
  • Red roses for bronze , 1932
  • Sea Garden , 1916
  • Tribute to the Angels , 1945
  • The Walls Do Not Fall , 1944
  • End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound , posthumously 1979
  • HERmione , posthumously 1981
  • Majic Ring , posthumously 2009
German editions

literature

  • Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos (Ed.): Majic ring / HD (writing as Delia Alton) , Gainesville, Fla. [u. a.]: Univ. Press of Florida, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8130-3347-1
  • Doolittle, Hilda , in: Élisabeth Roudinesco ; Michel Plon: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: Names, Countries, Works, Terms . Translation from French. Vienna: Springer, 2004, ISBN 3-211-83748-5 , pp. 192f.
  • Sasha Colby: Staging Modernist Lives. HD, Mina Loy , Nancy Cunard . Three Plays and Criticism. McGill Queen's University Press, Montréal 2017

Web links

notes

  1. ↑ contains bilingual: Notes on Thought and Vision, 1919; The Island. Fragments of Sappho, 1920 and some poems from Heliodora and other poems (1924), which are placed under a Sappho quotation and mostly refer antithetically to Sappho's odes. Without ISBN
personal data
SURNAME HD
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Doolittle, Hilda; Aldington, Alton; Delia Helforth, John (pseudonym); Doorn, Helga
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH September 27, 1961
Place of death Zurich