The Furies of Ted Hughes

...Lowell's seems wordy and overwrought in the wrong way...

...Athene institutes the first trial by jury, adjudicates by lifting Orestes' blood guilt, then transforms the furies into guardians of the household to insure the future prosperity of Athens...

...What school prayer signifies to the Religious Right, knowledge of Greek and Latin literature is to a breed of conservative academics...

...The conviction he brings to The Oresteia enriches our understanding of these plays, and crowns his life's achievement...

...In Coephori [the libation bearers] Agamemnon's son, Orestes, avenges his father by slaying his own mother and her new husband, but incurs the wrath of the furies, chthonic goddesses who haunt matricides...

...Aeschylus' tale is the story of the House of Atreus, where crimes committed by the members of one generation doom their children to perpetrate further atrocities until, at last, the wise goddess Athene devises a solution that brings an end to the cycle of violence and retribution...

...Certainly Greek mythology continued to be a font of inspiration for the leading modernists...

...But in doing so the translator takes a risk, since gory detail is more in the spirit of a Roman playwright like Seneca, the major influence on Elizabethan tragedy, than the more austere Greeks...

...Here, as elsewhere, Hughes preserves the ancient undertaking of people motivated less by conscious decision than by fate pushing them on inexorably...

...When high schoolers read Agamemnon, especially in the Lattimore or Louis MacNeice editions, it sounds a bit like Macbeth...

...But allusive phrases that Joyce or Eliot memorized in the schoolroom and referred to in their own works evoke for the contemporary reader Ulysses or The Waste Land, rather than the sources...

...In his late work, Hughes convinces us that he understood what it felt like to be hounded by furies...

...To break the cycle of violence, Athene must establish a new concept of law, where the impartial judgment of outsiders replaces the contradictory demands of personal vengeance...

...Richmond Lattimore's scholarly translation from the 1950s—the one subsequent generations most often read in school—assigns it to the Chorus...

...Lattimore faithfully renders her subsequent speech as: Ah, so...

...Everybody· knows I can kill a man...

...I could not believe it possible but I knew it...

...By cunning we killed—now cunning will kill us...

...I knew it...

...In Eumenides, the ghost of Clytemnestra tells the furies that Orestes is eluding his punishment, "gone away like any fawn/so lightly, from the very middle of your nets" (Lattimore...

...Aeschylus keeps the retelling of Iphigenia's sacrifice by her father, Agamemnon, terse and free of graphic detail...

...Furthermore, the image of snaring rabbits is somewhat more familiar to modern hunters than the concept of netting deer—not much practiced in Western cultures beyond ancient times...

...Since this city was the site of the festival where these plays were performed, the audience could look around them as the actor playing their patroness gave her ringing blessing to their homeland...

...We'll see whose throat...

...Each of these choices finds support among classical commentators...

...Romanticism broke with this ideal to an extent...

...Quick, quick...

...Jean Anouilh's Antigone evoked the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France...

...What readers of translations don't realize about these plays is that the manuscript tradition for The Oresteia happens to be quite thin...

...Maxwell Anderson's Medea suggested Shakespeare more than Euripides...

...She divines that the wayfarer is her son, returned for revenge...

...Lattimore's version is elegant and polished, perhaps too polished to convey a woman who knows she is about to face her murderer...

...The plays do not dismiss the claims of either side...

...A judicious comparison of different English versions will suggest that it isn't even clear in some cases what character is meant to be speaking...

...Aeschylus does not really fit Aristotle's schema for tragedy, and this new translation has finally broken The Oresteia free of a neo-Shakespearean or Freudian reading in which characters make faulty personal choices...

...it concentrated almost exclusively on the study of the Greco-Roman canon, on mastering its rhetorical devices...

...You speak in riddles but I read the rhyme...

...For years, commentators have read the poems of Hughes and Plath in the light of biographical detail...

...The Athenian trial in Eumenides poses a central question that has actually been implicit throughout the trilogy: When the needs of a male warrior society conflict with the female world of hearth and children, how can this be resolved, and where does justice lie...

...Eumenides takes place in Athens at the altar of Apollo, Orestes' protector...

...Nonetheless, it was not until well into the 20th century that a substantial proportion of authors couldn't read Homer or Sophocles, much less Cicero or Ovid, in their original tongues...

...The actions taken by Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes have been ordained by their circumstances and by complex codes of duty to family and the gods...

...Hughes takes occasional liberties with the text, though not the freewheeling cuts and emendations Robert Lowell made...

...Bring me an axe...

...Throughout the 18th century in particular, writers were schooled in classical rhetoric...

...It is probably not overreading to hear echoes of Plath in Clytemnestra's raging speeches as he translates them...

...The beginning of the triad, Agamemnon, relates the homecoming of the general who conquered Troy, and his murder by his wife and her lover, Aegisthus...

...We have been won by the treachery by which we slew...

...Hughes heightens it because, after all, this event explains Clytemnestra's decision to kill a husband...

...Clearly there is widespread anxiety lest they be correct, for of late a spate of new translations of the Iliad and Aeneid have appeared...

...Hughes jettisons the riddle trope to better capture her shock: I knew it...

...Lowell, who used Lattimore's translation in completing his own, expands on the Greek text: You say my throat is on the axe's edge...

...Let this long, bloody coil Come at last To the final twist...

...Well, that is not inappropriate to a play where the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy becomes central to the action...

...Bring me quick, somebody, an axe to kill a man and we shall see if we can beat him before we go down—so far gone are we in this wretched fight...

...In the 1930s and '40s, stage versions of Greek drama were adapted freely: Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (from The Oresteia) moved the bloody action of the original to New England just after the Civil War...

...What we learned from Birthday Letters is that Hughes tended to interpret his tragedy-filled life in terms of ancient ritual literature...

...Likewise, we recall some of the poet's own guilty self-questioning poems in the rueful musings of Agamemnon reliving his daughter's sacrifice, or the agony of Orestes caught between feelings of filial compassion and Apollo's demand that he avenge his father...

...Indeed, their education scarcely involved their own languages...

...At one point in Coephori, right after the mysterious stranger has reported the death of Orestes and been invited into the palace, a grieving and terrified servant of the just-murdered Aegisthus tells Clytemnestra, "The dead are killing the living...

...His early poetry delved into Celtic sources, but in Seneca's Oedipus and Tales from Ovid, he turned his hand to elegant and powerful adaptations of Latin works derived from mythology...

...Now, Farrar Straus Giroux has released his powerful and compelling translation of The Oresteia (198 pp., $24.00...

...Toward the end of his life, Ted Hughes began to revisit the ancients...

...Caught up in the fates of two wives who committed suicide—the second also killed their child—he learned how one can both be guiltless for the inner compulsions of others, yet haunted by one's actions and failures in regard to them...

...Bring me a weapon...

...Similarly, Hughes sometimes tinkers with analogy...

...No wonder we recast these dramas in some more familiar mode...

...Does the conclusion of The Eumenides belong to Athene or the Chorus...

...Hughes renders this "He has leapt out of the trap/Like a hare from a clump of grass—" an image that recalls Plath's "The Rabbit Catcher," with its female revulsion of male brute force...

...In the spirit of learning about one's ancestors through genealogy, commuters can now switch from the latest John Grisham to Robert Fagles' rendition of The Odyssey, or even a distinguished classicist lecturing on Greek tragedy...

...Readers of classical translations virtuously feel they are forging some valuable link to the past that will serve to enrich the present...

...Robert Lowell's rendition (published posthumously in 1978) divides alternating verses between the Chorus and Athene...

...God, let it be settled...

...Hughes' version also consistently sounds clearer and more immediate than rival translations because of the power of his language...

...Hughes lets her offer it as a benediction upon her city...

...Over the last 20 years traditionalists have decried the loss of classical learning, blaming it on such things as the decline of school standards and the deterioration of family values...

...At the same time Birthday Letters, recounting his life with Sylvia Plath, reminded us how deeply both poets were obsessed with the classical understanding of fate...

...The classics student tackling the original, however, confronts a fragmentary play pieced together with many conjectures, and full of a species of theological argument foreign to Judeo-Christian culture...