Robert Fagles

Robert Fagles was born in Philadelphia in 1933 and studied at Amherst College. He taught at Princeton from 1960 to 2002 and was the founding chair of its comparative literature department. Before the epics he published a book of his own poems, I, Vincent, drawn from the paintings of Van Gogh. He died in Princeton in March 2008, at 74.

Fagles translated into clear, contemporary English, set in unrhymed six-beat lines. He said he wanted to tell readers what Virgil says while also writing an English poem. He began with Greek drama, Sophocles' Three Theban Plays and Aeschylus' Oresteia, and then moved to epic: the Iliad in 1990, the Odyssey in 1996 and Virgil's Aeneid in 2006. His Homer sold far beyond the classroom, which surprised even him.

The Iliad won the Academy of American Poets' Harold Morton Landon Translation Award in 1991. The Odyssey earned him an Academy Award in Literature in 1996. He also received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for lifetime achievement in translation, and in 2006 the National Humanities Medal.

New readers can begin with The Odyssey, the story of Odysseus' long road home, in the Penguin edition with Bernard Knox's introduction and notes. Knox sets out the poem's background before the first page of verse, and the notes help with names and places. The Iliad, which covers the rage of Achilles and the war at Troy, is the natural second step. It carries the same Knox apparatus and Fagles's voice.