What, one wonders, would attract a poet to rewrite what is already a rewriting of a translation from the original Greek. For that is what Robert Lowell did with his Oresteia, based as it is on Richard Lattimore's poem script, which Lattimore in turn based on the translation appearing in H. W. Smyth's Loeb Classical Library text. (p. 200)

[A new "translation"] can be coming out of one or more of three motives: to explicate the drama in such a way that what was law and revelation to the pre-Hellenic Greeks is clarified for us; to "adapt" the drama for the twentieth-century American mind, imposing twentieth-century American equivalencies on its framework …; or simply to make new poetry out of old. Judging from Lowell's text, which certainly attempts neither of the first two, it was the third which motivated him.

Unfortunately, as poetry the work is slightly flawed, and as...