PHAEDRA AND FIGARO (213 pp.)Translated by Robert Lowell and Jacques BarzunFarrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5).
Translating classics is a little like skywriting. The effort is high-flown, and the blurs are dramatically visible. Remarkably blurless are two new translations: one, a tragedy, Racine's Phaedra, done by Robert Lowell; the other, a comedy, Beaumarchais' Figaro's Marriage, by Jacques Barzun. Coming after Robert Fitzgerald's superior modern rendering of The Odyssey (TIME, April 14), they suggest a boomlet in good translations.
Poet Lowell (Lord Weary's Castle) has taken the more demanding dare. For one thing, as he himself notes, Racine's flawless "syllabic Alexandrines...
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