Fagles was born on September 11, 1933, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Charles Fagles, a lawyer, and Vera Voynow Fagles, an architect. He attended Amherst College as a pre-med major but switched to English after reading translations of Greek classics. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.[4]
After graduating he attended Yale University, where he studied the English translators of the classics under Maynard Mack. While here he read Greek with Bernard Knox who wrote the introductions to several of Fagles’ translations and included Fagles’ translations in his portion of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (1979), and The Norton Book of Classical Literature (1993). After receiving his master's degree from Yale University he married Marilyn (Lynne) Duchovnay, a teacher, on June 17, 1956, and they adopted two children. In 1959, Fagles received his Ph.D in English from Yale and for the next year taught English there.[5]
Career
From 1960 to 1962, Fagles was an English instructor at Princeton University. In 1962 he was promoted to assistant professor, and in 1965 became an associate professor of English and comparative literature. Later that year he became director of the comparative literature program. In 1970, he became a full professor, and from 1975 was the department chair. He retired from teaching as the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature in 2002, and remained a professor emeritus at Princeton.[6]
Between 1961 and 1996, Fagles translated many ancient Greek works. His first translation was of the poetry of Bacchylides, publishing a complete set in 1961. In the 1970s, Fagles began translating much Greek drama, beginning with Aeschylus's The Oresteia. He went on to publish translations of Sophocles's three Theban plays (1982), Homer's Iliad (1990) and Odyssey (1996), and Virgil's Aeneid (2006). In these last four, Bernard Knox authored the introduction and notes. Fagles's translations generally emphasize contemporary English phrasing and idiom but are faithful to the original as much as possible.[7]
In 1978, Fagles published I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh. He was the co-editor of Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays (1962) and Pope's Iliad and Odyssey (1967).
On June 8, 2011, a resource center devoted to the study of the Classics was dedicated to Dr. Fagles at Princeton High School. At the dedication, students and teachers paid tribute to Dr. Fagles.[11]
