Robert Fagles

Robert Fagles, born on Sep 11, 1933, passed away on Mar 26, 2008.

Obituary

NEW YORK (AP) - Robert Fagles, a professor emeritus at Princeton University whose bold, poetic translations of works by Homer and Virgil made him the most popular and esteemed classical scholar of his time, has died. He was 74.

Fagles died Wednesday in Princeton of prostate cancer, the university said Friday.

"He was a quiet man, diligent and decorous, yet one who was unexpectedly equal to the swagger and savagery of Homer's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' in a way no one had managed before him," Princeton humanities professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon said in a statement.

According to Fagles' publisher, Viking, his translations have sold more than 4 million copies worldwide and he was the rare scholar who enjoyed both an academic and popular audience. He was not working on any project at the time of his death.

He received numerous awards, including a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Ralph Manheim prize for lifetime achievement. His editions were staged all over the world and the audiobooks attracted such acclaimed actors as Derek Jacobi, who narrates "The Iliad," and Simon Callow for "The Aeneid." One fan even wrote to Fagles, saying he wanted to name his cat after him.

"I suggested 'Bob-Cat,"' Fagles recalled in a 2006 interview with The Associated Press.

Two years ago, his long-awaited edition of "The Aeneid" was released, a decade-long project for which Fagles - whose specialty was Greek - had to refresh himself on the Latin he learned in college, using grammar books, and the works of Catullus and Horace and other Roman writers. He was first diagnosed with cancer while working on "The Aeneid" and suffered from Parkinson's disease.

"The Aeneid," Virgil's immortal tale of the warrior Aeneus and the founding of Rome, capped a trilogy of critically and commercially successful translations of the classical world's greatest epics, starting with "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." All were praised for honoring the translator's highest calling: Respecting the original text, while making it fresh and relevant for the contemporary reader.

The challenge is illustrated by Virgil's most famous words from "The Aeneid," the first line, "Arma virumque cano," immortalized in the 17th century by John Dryden as "Of Arms and the Man I Sing," a title George Bernard Shaw lifted for his anti-war comedy, "Arms and the Man."

But the line, and meaning, changes with every translator. For Dryden, and for some of Virgil's contemporaries, "Arms and the Man" was Virgil's boast that he would combine the qualities of Homer's two works ("The Iliad" being a story of arms, "The Odyssey" of a man, the soldier Odysseus) into a single story. Fagles' interpretation, "Wars and a man I sing," is more somber, emphasizing the contrast between the plurality of battles (wars) and the singularily of Aeneus (a man).

"I wanted to convey something about the modern understanding of war, and then about a man, an exile, a common soldier left terribly alone in the field of battle," he told the AP in 2006. "Aeneus is like Clint Eastwood, like Gary Cooper, a warrior and a worrier. He changes into the heroic tragic man, duty and endure, endure and duty."

In "The Aeneid," Fagles made other changes. He ignored meter and rhyme. While other translators told "The Aeneid" in the past tense, Fagles used the present, believing that the story demanded immediacy and tension.

Born in Philadelphia and himself a published poet, Fagles came to classical literature and translation relatively late, or late for his chosen field. He was a junior at Amherst College when he read "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" and longed to learn them in their original language.

Fagles' first published translation, of the lyric poet Bacchilydes, came out in 1961, around the same time he joined the Princeton University faculty. He translated several Greek tragedies, including works by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and took on "The Iliad" in the 1970s.

Fagle is survived by his wife of 51 years, Lynne, and their two grown daughters.
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press