4 The Genesis of Rachel Bespaloff ’s De l’Iliade James I. Porter It is rare that two thinkers should emerge in nearly identical historical circumstances, respond to identical cultural and political crises, and adopt analytical frameworks and terminologies that are both unprecedented and uncannily similar. But that is the case with Simone Weil (1909–43) and Rachel Bespaloff (1895–1949). Both women were French speakers of Jewish descent: Bespaloff, whose father was a well-known Zionist, was born in Bulgaria to Ukrainian parents and grew up in Geneva;1 Weil was born in Paris into an assimilated, non-observant Jewish family. Both were giſted writers, inclined towards philosophy, driven into exile by the fascists, and obliged, or so they felt, to connect Homer and the Bible to their own historical situations. Simone Weil composed ‘L’Iliade ou le poème de la force’ in 1938–39 based on sketches dating from 1936 to 1937.2 She published the essay in Les cahiers du Sud in two instalments in 1940–41 (December to January) under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Émile Novis. Bespaloff composed De l’Iliade by mid-1940 and published it with Brentano’s in New York in 1943, a year aſter she fled Europe. Her book was later translated by Mary McCarthy in 1947, two years aſter McCarthy translated Weil’s essay on Homer. 1 Née Pasmanik, she was known as Rachel Bespalova among her Slavic-speaking acquaintances. See Daniel Halévy, ‘Rachel Bespaloff ’, Conférence 6 (1998): 435–50, and especially p. 438. For a com- prehensive biographical overview, see now Cristina Guarnieri’s ‘biographia’ in Rachel Bespaloff, Opere complete, vol. 1, L’eternità nell’istante: Gli anni francesi (1932–1942), ed. Cristina Guarnieri and Laura Sanò, trans. Valerio Bernacchi, Annalisa Comes, Claude Cazalé Bérard, Massimo Ferraris, and Massimo Palma (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2022), 25–115. 2 Simone Weil, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2.3, ed. André A. Devaux, Florence de Lussy, Géraldi Leroy, et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 305–09. The present chapter grew out of work in progress on Bespaloff ’s De l’Iliade. I am indebted to Monique Jutrin for her exemplary pioneering scholarship on Rachel Bespaloff and for her advice on countless questions, as well as for sharing the handwritten correspondence between Jean Grenier and Bespaloff, from which I quote minimally with her kind permission. I am further grateful to Marie-Brunette Spire for discussion of Halévy’s Jewish ancestry and other biographical particulars mentioned in his Pays parisiens and for comments on the final version. Seth Schein helpfully corrected some egregious and not-so-egregious errors. Chris Benfey graciously entertained my at times insistent queries. Leslie Fields, head of Archives and Special Collections at Mount Holyoke College, kindly shared materials with me as I was researching this chapter. Further thanks are owed to the editors of this volume and to the audience of the original conference.