Word: phaedra
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...PHAEDRA AND FIGARO (213 pp.)-Translated by Robert Lowell and Jacques Barzun-Farrar, Straus & Cudahy...
Translating classics is a little like skywriting. The effort is high-flown, and the blurs are dramatically visible. Remarkably blurless are two new translations: one, a tragedy, Racine's Phaedra, done by Robert Lowell; the other, a comedy, Beaumarchais' Figaro's Marriage, by Jacques Barzun. Coming after Robert Fitzgerald's superior modern rendering of The Odyssey (TIME, April 14), they suggest a boomlet in good translations...
...English."* Lowell relies on loose-rhythmed couplets with idiomatic echoes of the English Restoration. Another hazard is that the powdered elegance and stately cadences of French 17th century tragic drama have proved persistently uncongenial to Anglo-American tastes. Poet Lowell, stoking his lines with fire and flair, keeps Phaedra and its key characters well above room temperature...
...underlying story comes from Greek myth via the Hippolytus of Euripides. Hippolytus is the bastard son of Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, and Hippolyte, single-breasted queen of the Amazons. He lives in the home of Theseus and Theseus' young bride Phaedra. An outdoors he-man sort, Hippolytus neglects the service of Aphrodite, goddess of love. The goddess puts a sex hex on Phaedra, who is consumed with a ravenous passion for her stepson Hippolytus. She is rebuffed in her advances, and in revenge tells Theseus that the boy has made attempts on her virtue. Theseus prays...
...Euripides developed it, the tragedy was nature's rebuke to pride. Hippolytus had ignored the elemental force of love. In Racine's hands, the focus is on the hysteric furor of a woman scorned, the unrequited love that becomes undiluted hate. Phaedra's pathos is to writhe vainly in a jungle of untamed instincts...