Remembering Robert Fagles

There are precious few scholars who reach the bestseller lists, much less remain on them eighteen years after their death. Yet some thirty years after publication, only a dozen English titles are selling more copies than Robert Fagles’s Odyssey. If you search, Fagles is the subject of no current news stories. The press barely mentions his name. It is in some ways an appropriate tribute: Even at the height of his success as a translator, he was a gentleman of the old school: quiet, gentle, understated, never thrusting himself into the spotlight. He simply did his work well—bringing the literature of another language into a form that could be loved in his own—and would speak intelligently about it when asked. Still I think it is a fine time, now that the Odyssey is back in the news, to celebrate the man who introduced Homer and Vergil and Sophocles and Aeschylus to millions of English readers.