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The great poet's powerful translation of the classic trilogy of Greek drama. With Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes was recognized as a superb interpreter of the classics, and with his Birthday Letters, addressed to Sylvia Plath, he was revealed to a large public as a poet of extraordinarily deep feeling. The Oresteia of Aeschylus caps a remarkable year for his poetry. Aeschylus (525-456 b.c.) was, with Sophocles, the greatest classical Greek dramatist. The Oresteia--Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides--tells the story of the house of Atreus: after King Agamemnon is murdered by Clytemnestra, their son, Orestes, is commanded by Apollo to avenge the crime by killing his mother, and he does so, bringing on himself the wrath of the Furies and the judgment of Athens. Hughes's "acting version" of the trilogy is itself a great performance; while artfully inflected with the contemporary, it has a classical beauty and authority. The Oresteia of Aeschylus deserves to become the standard edition for English-language readers and for the stage, too.

"[T]his vivid free-verse translation of Aeschylus' dark and bloody tragic trilogy...evinces Hughes's wide range of interests and mastery of classic literatures....[A]n essential further installment in the always interesting oeuvre of a gifted poet who was also a diligent scholar."

Kirkus, 06/01/1999

"The problem is not that Hughes adapts or adds to the poem....But Hughes's changes move out and away from the text rather than deeper into it."

Garry Wills, New York Times Book Review, 09/05/1999

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