I just found out that Robert Fagles, brilliant translator of those great Greek epics like the version of The Iliad I read a few weeks ago, died last week of prostate cancer. He was 74. Poor guy. I hold him in the same kind of esteem I hold John Adams, David Lynch, Nabokov.

From The New York Times:

“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.”

His recent translation of The Aeneid is on my short short list. I fantasized reading the version in the collection of Loeb’s my dad gave me a couple of years ago, but Fagles’ sounds much more appealing, don’t you think?

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