Robert Fagles, Translator of the Classics, Dies at 74
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: March 29, 2008
Robert Fagles, the renowned translator of Latin and Greek whose versions of Homer and Virgil were unlikely best sellers and became fixtures on classroom reading lists, died on Wednesday at his home in Princeton, N.J., where he was an emeritus professor at Princeton University. He was 74.
The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Lynne, to whom he had been married for 51 years.
Mr. Fagles translated Aeschylus and Sophocles, among other authors, but he is most famous for his versions of “The Iliad,” published in 1990; “The Odyssey,” in 1996; and “The Aeneid,” which came out in 2006. All were published by Viking.
He is one of very few translators to have taken on all three of the great classical epics — something that not even Pope attempted — and all three have sold millions of copies, both in print and in audio versions narrated by Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Simon Callow.
Their success was due largely to Mr. Fagles’s gifts as a writer. He was not an exactingly literal translator but rather one who sought to reinterpret the classics in a contemporary idiom. He once compared his job to writing Braille for the blind, and said that he imagined in a generation or two that someone would have to come along and re-Braille it.
While faithful to the spirit and intent of the original, his translations were remarkable for their narrative energy and verve. His “Iliad” and “Odyssey” had a Homeric swagger, said the poet Paul Muldoon, a colleague at Princeton, who also compared Mr. Fagles’s epic vision to that of film directors like Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.
His version of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” for example, has a natural, unforced syntax and language that are at once heightened and colloquial as he describes the Trojan horse being pulled into the city:
We breach our own ramparts, fling our defenses open,
all pitch into the work. Smooth running rollers
we wheel beneath its hoofs, and heavy hempen ropes
we bind around its neck, and teeming with men-at-arms
the huge deadly engine climbs our city walls.
Robert Fagles was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 11, 1933. His father, a lawyer, died when Mr. Fagles was 14, an event that he later said made him particularly susceptible to the persistent father-son theme in classical literature. He was reared by his mother, who was trained as an architect but who never became a practicing one.
His high school, Lower Merion, in Ardmore, Pa., offered Latin, but Mr. Fagles took German, because the German teacher was popular. He did not become interested in the classics until his freshman year, in 1952, at Amherst College, where he began as a pre-med student and later switched to English. He studied Latin and Greek on the side at Amherst — “smuggling it in,” he later said — and did the same at the Yale Graduate School, where he got his Ph.D. in English in 1959.
One of his classics teachers at Yale was Bernard Knox, who became a lifelong friend and who wrote introductions to Mr. Fagles’s “Iliad,” “Odyssey” and “Aeneid.”
After teaching at Yale for a year, Mr. Fagles joined the faculty at Princeton as an English teacher in 1960 and remained at Princeton until he retired, in 2002. He was an immensely popular teacher and also the creator and longtime head of the university’s department of comparative literature. In June the university awarded him an honorary doctorate.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Fagles is survived by two daughters, Katya, of Randolph, N.J., and Nina, of Hampden, Me., and three grandchildren.
Mr. Fagles said he had never planned to tackle the big three of classical literature. He began by setting himself some smallish tasks of translation, just as an exercise. His first published translation, of the Greek poet Bacchylides, came out in 1961, and it was followed by versions of “The Oresteia,” by Aeschylus, and of Sophocles’ three Theban plays (“Antigone,” “Oedipus the King” and “Oedipus at Colonus”) before he felt ready to take on the epics. To get through them, he remarked later, required a “lot of nerve and a lot of luck.”
He also said he couldn’t decide which of the epics was his favorite. Some days were Iliadic, he said — you felt you were in a war — and some were more like the Odyssey, when all you wanted to do was go home.
But “The Aeneid,” he said, had proved to be unexpectedly timely and relevant, describing it as “a tale of exhortation.”
“It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2006. “The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”
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