Robert Fagles, eminent scholar and translator, died this past Wednesday at the age of 74. Fagles is best known for his masterly translations of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, which were published by Viking Press between 1990 and 2006. He also will be missed by the Princeton University community, where he had taught for more than 40 years.
He is 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....
Their success was due largely to Mr. Fagles’s gifts as a writer. He was not an exactingly literal translator but rather one who sought to reinterpret the classics in a contemporary idiom. He once compared his job to writing Braille for the blind, and said that he imagined in a generation or two that someone would have to come along and re-Braille it. (via NYT)
Chris Hedges's 2004 interview with Fagles addresses the importance of these works and these translations in our time:
Every age needs classics translated into the idiom of the moment. It gives the works new vitality, new meaning. It offers to the living a connection with those who went before, the accumulated wisdom of the past, a protection from a dangerous provincialism.
"In Virgil, as in Homer, you find great reservoirs of memory," [Fagles] said. "You find the restorative power of love set against a world of violence. There is sadness in the poem. There are innumerable losses. War wages on too long. Nearly every book in 'The Aeneid' ends with certain death. Aeneas reaches out to the ghosts of those he loved, always beyond his grasp."
With those words in mind, I also want to offer this post to the memory of Dith Pran, survivor of the Cambodian killing fields, who died on Sunday at the age of 65.
Beautiful post, thank you!
Posted by: David Jacobs | April 01, 2008 at 10:42 AM