In Memoriam Robert Fagles (1933-2008)

I was surprised by how sad I felt to learn that Robert Fagles has passed away. In my opinion, he was certainly the greatest of all the modern translators of Homer. I have chosen to teach out of his translations more frequently than any others--in fact I am teaching out of his Iliad this very semester. Fagles's NYTimes obituary is decent (unlike the ridiculously partisan one they did on Jacques Derrida).

I remember the first time I read his work, when I was a new graduate student in Classics. I had read Homer in E.V. Rieu's and Richmond Lattimore's versions, and I was just beginning to know enough Greek to read Homer in the original. One semester when I was working as a TA, the professor used Fagles's translation of the Iliad. As I read Fagles's version, it seemed so clear and simple that I kept thinking he was simplifying the complexities of the Greek; but every time I would check the Greek I would be startled to see how clear and simple Homer himself was and startled to realize that I had always assumed Homeric Greek was denser, thicker, and more difficult than it was. So in a sense, it was Fagles who opened my eyes to some of the most important qualities of Homeric Greek. Not quite as dramatically as Keats's experience of Homer through Chapman, but it made a real impression on me.

I want to quote from Fagles's Iliad in honor of this giant among translators. This is the passage in which Homer describes how, at Zeus's orders, Sleep and Death carry the newly fallen Sarpedon's body away from the battlefield and back to the greener pastures of his homeland (16.790-99; the ellipsis in this passage is original):

and Phoebus did not neglect the Father's strong desires.
Down from Ida's slopes he dove to the bloody field
and lifting Prince Sarpedon clear of the weapons,
bore him far from the fighting, off and away,
and bathed him well in a river's running tides
and anointed him with deathless oils . . .
dressed his body in deathless, ambrosial robes
then sent him on his way with the wind-swift escorts,
twin brothers Sleep and Death, who with all good speed
set him down in Lycia's broad green land.