I was saddened this week to learn of the recent death at 74 (of prostate cancer) of Robert Fagles. (He is seen at left, with his last major work, "The Aeneid.")

Fagles was the Princeton University professor who translated ancient Greek and Roman epic poems by Homer ("The Iliad" and "The Odyssey") and Vergil ("The Aeneid") and ancient Greek tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles into English bestsellers.

By last count, he had sold something over 4 million copies of the classics in English.

That's no small feat in an age of John Grisham, Danielle Steele, James Patterson novels and Oprah's book club.

Fagles' way of translating, which strikes me as similar to the poet Ezra Pound's approach to translating early in the 20th century, was to aim for a natural and dramatic sounding idiomatic English (Fagles used unrhymed six-beat lines heavy with Anglo-Saxon monosyllables rather than Latinate polysyllables and lots of alliteration) that is clear, direct and forcefully rhythmic rather than purely "accurate" as a more or less literal rendition.

One might even consider his versions of such classic, cornerstone poems more as transcriptions than as translations.

"I didn't want to be too literal. Or too literary," Fagles said in 2006, describing his "Aeneid" translation. "I want to tell you what Virgil says, but I want to write an English poem at the same time."

He certainly succeeded.

Anyway, I think of Fagles as the Odysseus of translators, a fitting description I think for a man who translated "The Odyssey."

I say that because Fagles himself did not start out as a classicist or a classics translator.

He himself was, as he describes Odysseus in the first line of "The Odyssey," "a man of twists and turns."

Here's why.

Fagles started out an undergraduate at Amherst College who intended to go into medicine. But as a junior he started to study Greek and Latin, rather late by most standards. Then he did his doctorate at Yale.

Yes, in English.

But Fagles, himself a published poet, eventually got sidetracked into classics.

As I often tell my students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you don't always find your career. Sometimes, even oftentimes, you have to be patient and wait for your career to find you.

That's when a career then becomes a calling.

And that's how Fagles, the Odysseus of translators, found his way home after many years of wandering and escaping other temptations and the call of sirens.

According to the obituary in The Washington Post, Fagles became director of Princeton's program in comparative literature in 1966, then served as founding chairman of the department from 1975 to 1994. He taught a seminar on epic poetry in translation that was one of the university's most popular courses until his retirement in 2002. Copies of his books were awarded to distinguished freshmen, who stood in line for his autograph.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society and received the National Humanities Medal and the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal.

In describing his life's work, Fagles once said, "My feeling is that if something is timeless, then it will also be timely."

I have only read some of Fagles' work and I am not qualified to compare it to the famous translations of, says, Richmond Lattimore or Edith Hamilton.

But I know that his translations caught my attention and stayed on my tongue. They teased my mind and captured my memory, and made me want to read more, much more, of them.

Is there a higher praise or a higher purpose for those who bring the ancient classics to modern readers?

Did any of you take classes with Fagles or somehow study with him? What was he like as a teacher and a person?

Have you read his various translations?

How do you like them?

Which ones are the best?

And how do they compare to other popular translations of the classics?

Let Art Talk know.