Fagles, Robert

Robert Fagles (1933-2008) was a renowned translator of Greek and Latin classics, whose bestselling translations of Homer and Virgil's epics are recognized for reinterpreting the classics in a contemporary idiom. Fagles was also the Arthur Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he taught English and classics from 1960 until 2002 and founded the Department of Comparative Literature, which he chaired for two decades.

Born in Philadelphia on September 11, 1933, Fagles attended Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, where he studied German. He first developed an interest in the classics during his freshman year at Amherst College in 1952 and eventually switched his major from pre-med to English. Graduating summa cum laude in 1955, Fagles went on to complete his Ph.D. in English literature at Yale University in 1959, where he taught as an instructor for one year. At Yale, Fagles met Bernard Knox, a classicist who became a lifelong friend and later edited and wrote introductions to his published translations. After joining the Princeton faculty in the Department of English in 1960, Fagles became the director of Princeton's Program in Comparative Literature in 1966. Upon the program's inception as an official department in 1975, Fagles served as its founding chair until 1994, where he was credited with integrating literary study with translation and the creative arts. Throughout his career at Princeton, Fagles taught both undergraduate and graduate courses, including freshman seminars, specializing in the classical tradition in English and European literature, the theory and practice of translation, and forms of poetry. After his retirement in 2002, he remained an emeritus professor. Princeton awarded him an honorary doctorate in humane letters in 2007.

Fagles began his career as a translator with the publication of the Complete Poems of the Greek lyric poet Bacchylides, released by Yale University Press in 1961, followed by Pindar's Olympian Odes, which appeared serially in the journal Arion in 1964 and 1965. Moving on to the Greek tragedies, Fagles then translated Aeschylus's Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides), published in 1975, and Sophocles's Three Theban Plays (Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus), published in 1982, both with Viking Penguin. Fagles remains best known for his popular translations of the three great classical epics, Homer's Iliad (1990) and Odyssey (1996) and Virgil's Aeneid (2006). In 1979, Fagles also published a book of original poems titled I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Vincent Van Gogh, billed as a collection of translations of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh. Fagles's original poems have also appeared in various literary journals, including The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Antaeus, and Grand Street.

Fagles was the recipient of many awards over his lifetime, including the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities from Princeton University (1989), the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets (1991), an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996), the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation (1997), and the National Humanities Medal (2006). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and holds honorary degrees from Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Yale University, and Princeton University.

Robert Fagles was married to Lynne Fagles (née Marilyn Duchovnay) for 51 years, with whom he had two daughters, Katya and Nina. He died in 2008 at age 74.