Word: aeschylus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...there no sense, no purpose, to the universe? Later R.F.K. scrawled on a yellow sheet, "The innocent suffer--how can that be possible and God be just?" He found solace in Aeschylus, memorizing the lines from the Agamemnon that he would use when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed: "He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace...
...seat. And if anything happened to him, my brother Teddy would run for us." After the assassination, however, R.F.K. entered a long and deep depression. "Without Ethel," a friend once said, "Bobby might well have gone off the deep end." He found some solace in Sophocles and Aeschylus, but it was only in March 1965, when he scaled Mount Kennedy, the 13,900-ft. Yukon peak, that he was able to overcome his own darkness...
Robert Fagles, 63, has been teaching literature at Princeton since 1960. It was only after translating tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles that he began to consider "climbing back to the source" of Greek legends and taking on the herculean tasks of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Fagles knows that well-stocked bookstores will display plenty of competition for his forthcoming Odyssey, including the highly regarded verse renditions of Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Richmond Lattimore (1965). But, says Fagles, "every generation needs a new translation of Homer. He was a performer, and he can be re-performed...
...learn when you teach required course that there is always a trade-off," says Porter University Professor Helen H. Vendler. "I personally feel sorry for people who are going to die without reading a poem by Horace or play by Aeschylus, but that's up to them...
...Degrees" greatest asset remains John Guare's dazzling script. With humor and affection, it pokes fun at everything from marriage ("My wife is a dada manifesto"), to Cats ("Aeschylus did not invent theater to have it end with a bunch of chorus kids wondering which of them will go to Kitty Kat Heaven."), to Harvard students, ("Is that all I am? An investment?"). At the same time it captures with great compassion and understanding the tragic fears and disappointments in the lives of those who seem to have...