Volume 26, Number 3 · March 8, 1979
Lowell and the Furies
By D.S. Carne-Ross
The Oresteia of Aeschylus
translated by Robert Lowell
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 129 pp., $8.95
Lowell called his reworkings of foreign poems imitations. As a purely descriptive term, appropriations would do equally well. Where Pound's translations are selfless, so many attempts to find voices through which the dead could speak, Lowell's are (again neutrally) egotistical. All his poets talk Lowell and where they won't or can't, the result is chaos. Leopardi spoke of le sudate carte, his laborious pages: a theory of composition. In Lowell's hands this becomes 'the heat / of my writings made the letters wriggle and melt / under drops of sweat.' (Always the concrete particular!)
Review, 3086 words
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