The Oresteia of Aecschylus

Robert Lowell completed his translation of Agamemnon and Orestes, the first two plays of the Aeschylus trilogy, in the sixties. The Furies was finished before his death in 1977. In his prefatory note, Lowell writes that his aim was not an exact translation but rather "to trim, cut, and be direct enough to satisfy my own mind and at a first hearing the simple ears of a theater audience." Robert Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times called Lowell's version "an astonishing accomplishment, both as reading and on the stage where he intended it to be presented. . . . Even in a living room the language brings alive the beacons of fire announcing the fall of Troy, the vengeance, and the violence."