Robert Fagles (1933–2008)

Robert Fagles, the Arthur Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University, died in Princeton on March 26, 2008, after a long illness which he faced with great courage. A renowned translator, whose versions of Greek tragedy, Homer, and Vergil have been international bestsellers, Fagles was, in addition, a beloved and inspirational teacher and a gifted administrator, the founding father of comparative literature at Princeton University. A man with a remarkable gift for friendship, Bob Fagles will be greatly missed by his family, friends, colleagues, and students.

Fagles was an undergraduate at Amherst College, where he graduated with a degree in English literature in 1955. He began learning Greek at Amherst, and continued his studies with a Ph.D. in English Literature at Yale University in 1959. In the next year, 1960, he came to Princeton as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English; he was to remain at Princeton for the rest of his career. When the new Program in Comparative Literature began in 1966, Fagles was its first Director, and when the Program became a Department in 1975 he was the founding chair, continuing in this post until 1994. He retired from the faculty in 2002, and in 2007, within the shortest allowable time, Princeton awarded him an honorary doctorate of humane letters for his distinguished contributions to the university and to the world of humane learning.

Fagles was one of the modern world’s most distinguished and influential translators of ancient literature. He published translations of Bacchylides (1961), Aeschylus’ Oresteia (1975), and Sophocles’ Theban Plays (1982), but it was his translations of Homer’s Iliad (1990) and Odyssey (1996) that lifted him into the superleague where his books were assigned to legions of high school students and also avidly read by their parents. These versions of Homer were designed to be read aloud, and they have been recorded by great actors who can bring the texts to life (Derek Jacobi for the Iliad, and Ian McKellen for the Odyssey). The energy and momentum of Fagles’ Homer translations have been phenomenally successful in giving modern Greekless readers a conception of the power of the original.

In 2006, when he was already seriously ill, his Aeneid appeared to great acclaim, hailed by Richard Jenkyns in the Times Literary Supplement as “perhaps the Aeneid for our century.” His Vergil is in many respects his most impressive achievement of all: more stringent in form than his Homer, it rises to the challenge of the aspect of Vergil that makes him such a nightmare to translators, his combination of highly wrought formal expression and intense passion. In translating Vergil, Fagles cashes in on his long years in the Homeric workshop, for his developed verse has the energy and the sympathy to convey the terrific pace Vergil can develop in extended narrative, or to capture the eerie moments of horror or shock, as in the Underworld in book 6 and in the satanic progress of the Fury Allecto in book 7. The result is strikingly successful, since a translator-poet with a commitment to the elemental has accommodated himself to a poet who works his effects through traditions of high formalism.

Fagles received many awards for his work, including the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On November 9, 2006, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Bush. As a lifelong Democrat, he could not help but savor the moment before the ceremony when he was approached in the corridor by someone who introduced himself as a long-standing fan, requesting an autograph in his copy of the Iliad translation; unable to raise his head high enough from his wheelchair to look the fan in the eyes, Fagles asked what name he should write in the book, and was told “Karl Rove.”

Remarkable personal qualities of kindness, gentleness, wit, and charm made Bob Fagles someone to treasure, and he leaves a great hole in the lives of his many friends. His dedication to his craft has given us works of enduring quality, and memories of him...