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Crossing Borders
Volume 7, Number 1 - Fall 2008
Translor of Iliad,
Odyssey was also Friend of P&S / GyC -
remembering Robert Fagles
by Anndee Hochman
Robert Fagles believed in going back to the source. After translating ancient Greek works including Sophocles’ Antigone, Fagles turned his attention to the poems that inspired Sophocles and others: Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” His translations of those epics, published in 1990 and 1996, became unlikely best-sellers, won critics’ praise and prompted fan mail from high-school and college readers nationwide.
Fagles died on March 26; his work as a teacher, poet, translator and friend of People & Stories will continue to resonate. He read from “The Odyssey” at the first People & Stories benefit in 2005. His wife, Lynne, is a People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos board member. And, in Fagles’ memory, the program will donate copies of his translations, including Virgil’s “The Aeneid,” to participants at the Bo Robinson Education and Training Center in Trenton.
Readers there may identify with Odysseus, a character Fagles once described as “an anti-hero. He doesn’t always come clad in armor. He’s often clad in beggar’s rags, and he’s devious and deceptive and cunning and a little cruel, too…He’s many-faceted, and I think that’s a great source of his appeal.”
Like the contemporary pieces read in People & Stories, “The Odyssey” can speak across centuries and continents. Fagles told an Online NewsHour interviewer in 1997 that “The Odyssey is a poem that can hit us, strike chords with us at virtually every age.” He described it as a coming-of-age tale for adolescents, a story of struggle, success and good fortune for midlife readers and “song of eternal return” that speaks to the yearnings of the old. “It’s everything to all people,” he said.
Lynne Fagles, who first spied her future husband when she was 13 and began to date him when both were students at Lower Merion High School outside Philadelphia, said he didn’t plan to major in classics. “He began as a pre-med student at Amherst. One summer when he was taking organic chemistry, his mother said, ‘Either stop complaining or change your major.’ He changed his major.”
Fagles taught at Yale, then at Princeton, where he eventually chaired the comparative literature department and won a reputation as a modest, generous and gifted teacher. But it was his translations that brought him acclaim outside the academy; Amazon.com raved that “The Odyssey” was “a jaw-droppingly beautiful rendering…Fagles captures the rapid and direct language of the original Greek, while telling the story of Odysseus in lyrics that ring with a clear, energetic voice.”
Lynne Fagles said her husband took pleasure in making ancient works accessible without diluting them; in translating, “He certainly felt that he was getting inside the work… understanding that person’s use of language,” she said.
Fagles was always attuned to the connections between the ancient world he translated and the modern one in which he lived. He told NewsHour that “The Odyssey” was, in part, a “deeply married kind of poem” and credited feminist scholars for helping to shape his understanding of Penelope’s role.
“This is a poem about family values, and where families are of value, and the families don’t always get along so well. There’s a lot of irritation and abrasion, as well as deep affiliation and affection that finally wins out. And then I think, too, that ‘The Odyssey’ is the great poem of the post-war world.”