Prometheus Bound: Robert Lowell and Aeschylus Jerome Mazzaro Some of the same problems of mediational intrusion that occur in Robert Lowell’s translation of Phèdre recur in his translation of Prometheus Bound. Much as Racine’s play had become distorted to accommodate events from Lowell’s life and his various preoccupations, so, too, does Aeschylus’ drama. Here, however, the question of “classicism” is more pronounced, the original less accessible, and the modernizations are more obvious. French classicists, for example, were never quite able to come to terms with the play; they found Aeschylus’ subject “monstrous” and, generally by reason of its dealing primarily not with humans but with superhumans, unsuitable for tragedy. The plot was episodic, the characters bizarre and improbable, and the diction wild and barbaric. There was, moreover, no proper intrigue, and nothing was proved. In listing the types of tragedy, Aristotle had specifically placed the play in the fourth and lowest category, lesser in value than the complex or pathetic or characterological and, in the seventeenth century, a writer like John Dryden could use Longinus either to support or to at tack the language. But even without a general framework of “classicism,” the play poses certain technical problems: its main character is basically immobile from the start, “chained to a rock, orated to, and orating at, a sequence of embodied appari tions” (PB, v).l Unlike that of most protagonists of Greek drama, his “sin” has been committed before the play begins, and what an audience is asked to witness as action is the nature of his punishment and suffering. Yet, by the time Friedrich Nietzs che came to write The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he could refer to Prometheus as the embodiment of “activity” as opposed to the aged Oedipus who becomes the personification of “passivity.” 278 Jerome Mazzaro 279 Prometheus’ theft of fire—like his foreknowledge—will allow man in time to acquire culture by himself and compel “the gods to ally themselves with him, because in his self-sufficient wisdom he [will hold] in his hands their existence and their limitations.”2 Thus any derivation from Aeschylus’ treatment of Prome theus in Prometheus Bound cannot be classical in quite the sense that Racine’s drama is. Titans are not humans and the region of Prometheus’imprisonment is not that of Troezen. Being other worldly, character and setting are accessible only by imagination, and this accessibility provides its own approaches. Characters can become ideologues, and the playwright need not rely on the life experiences of either an original or his own past to make the work credible; all he need do is present ideas. Lowell’s re sponse to these advantages is twofold: to go to a previous trans lation of the play and thereby close the gap between the original and his version by making apparent the realm of literature that, like his Phaedra, Prometheus will inhabit; and to recon ceive the collapsed baroque he had essayed in his translation of Phèdre by interiorizing the formal elements. Verifiability dimin ishes, and prose replaces the external run-on couplet. The sug gestion of limiting end-stopped lines which passion overruns gives way to amorphous paragraphs and the tendency toward ratiocination that one associates with heroic couplet falls victim to the thought associations of language. Part of this going to prose, Lowell explains in an Author’s Note, is “to tone down the poetic eloquence” of the original, hopefully to rescue its ex cesses from the attacks of French classicism and render the play in a manner approaching more a “common style.” “Using prose instead of verse,” he goes on to say, “I was free to . . . shove in any thought that occurred to me and seemed to fit. My idea was for some marriage between the old play and a new one” (PB, v). Later, he confided to D. S. Carne-Ross in a Delos interview (1968), “I didn’t even want to worry about line length when I was doing Prometheus, but be perfectly free to be prolix and to elaborate as much as I wanted without any metrical re strictions” (PRL, 66). Since Lowell admits having based his version not on the...
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Oct 12, 2005
Andrew D Wong 
Open Access
