SOURCE: "On Translating Phèdre" in Collected Prose, edited by Robert Giroux, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987, pp. 230-31.

Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, Lowell is generally considered the premier American poet of his generation. One of the original proponents of the confessional school of poetry, he frequently gave voice to his personal as well as his social concerns, leading many to consider him the prototypical liberal intellectual writer of his time. Lowell was also a widely acclaimed translator and playwright as well as critic and editor. In the following excerpt from the introduction to his 1961 translation of Phèdre, he comments upon the difficulties of translating Racine's poetry, with "the justness of its rhythms and logic, and the glory of its hard, electric rage."

Racine's plays are generally and correctly thought to be untranslatable. His syllabic alexandrines do not and cannot exist in...