Background

Robert Fagles was born on September 11, 1933, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Charles and Vera (Voynow) Fagles and grew up outside of Philadelphia, in a household beset by his father’s illness. Robert was the only child in the family.

Education

Fagles attended Amherst College, graduating in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. The following year, he received his master's degree from Yale University and received his doctorate in English from it in 1959.

Career

After teaching at Yale for a year, Fagles joined the faculty at Princeton as an English teacher in 1960 and remained at Princeton until he retired, in 2002. From 1960 to 1962, he served as an English instructor. In 1962 he was promoted to assistant professor, and in 1965 became an associate professor of English and comparative literature. Later that year he became director of the comparative literature program.

In 1970, Fagles was appointed as a full professor, and from 1975 served as the department chair. He retired from teaching as the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature in 2002 and remained a professor emeritus at Princeton.

One of Fagles’s earliest published translations as a translator and author was the complete poems of the ancient Greek poet Bacchylides in 1961. He moved on to the tragic plays of the ancient Greek poet and dramatist Aeschylus and the ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles—the Oresteia trilogy and the Theban plays, respectively— in the 1970s and early 1980s. Then came his greatest public successes, his translations of Homer’s two verse epics The Iliad and The Odyssey, the touchstones of Western literature. These two works have been described as the first novels, and have influenced such important writers as Dante, Shakespeare, and James Joyce. They have also been translated countless times, including a version by the great English poet Alexander Pope.

Achievements

• Robert Fagles, the renowned translator of Greek classics, was widely acclaimed for his popular translations of Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” both of which became best-sellers. He also created English renditions of “The Oresteia” by Aeschylus and “The Three Theban Plays” by Sophocles as well as “The Aeneid” by the Roman poet Virgil. In addition, it must be mentioned, Robert Fagles 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.
  
  During his career, Fagles received numerous awards and was nominated for the National Book Award in Translation in 1991.
  
  On June 8, 2011, a resource centre devoted to the study of the Classics was dedicated to Dr Fagles at Princeton High School. At the dedication, students and teachers paid tribute to Dr Fagles.

Works

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• book

  • The Aeneid

    (From the award-winning translator of The Iliad and The Od...)

    2006
  • The Three Theban Plays

    (Towering over the rest of Greek tragedy, these three play...)

    2008
  • The Odyssey

    (The great epic of Western literature, translated by the a...)

    1997
  • The Iliad

    (The great war epic of Western literature, translated by a...)

    1998
  • I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh 1978
  • Complete Poems 1998
  • Aeschulus The Oresteia 1977

Views

“The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of the fifth-century man; all his furious energy and intellectual daring drive him on to this terrible discovery of his fundamental ignorance - he is not the measure of all things but the thing measured and found wanting.”

Membership

Fagles was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society.

Personality

Robert Fagles was, according to his friends, a quiet man, diligent and decorous.

Physical Characteristics: Fagles died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on March 26, 2008, from prostate cancer.

Quotes from others about the person

• “Bob Fagles was not simply a superb translator, poet and teacher of poetry,” said Edmund Keeley, the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English Emeritus and a friend since Fagles joined the faculty. “He was among those select colleagues who were always generous toward others, whether fellow teachers, students or supporting staff. He could not speak ill of anyone he came to know or practice witty judgments, yet he was a discriminating reader. His breadth of spirit, along with his poet’s ear for language, were among the attributes that allowed him to understand and render the greatest ancient poets with both sensitivity and passion.”
  
  C.K. Williams, lecturer with the rank of professor in creative writing and the Lewis Center for the Arts: “Robert Fagles was the most widely read and widely celebrated poet-translator of his time, indeed of any time. He was also the kindest, most generous, most loving person I’ve ever met, and I don’t believe these facts are unrelated. His work is radiant with a love of poetry, of language, of people, of the entire human experience. There was no one like him.”

Interests

• Music, travelling

Connections

On June 17, 1956, Fagles married Marilyn (Lynne) Duchovnay, a teacher, and they had two children, Katya and Nina.

Father:

Charles Fagles

Mother:

Vera (Voynow) Fagles

Daughter:

Ekaterina Fagles

Daughter:

Nina Falges

Wife:

Marilyn (Duchovnay) Fagles