Robert Fitzgerald

Robert Stuart Fitzgerald (12 October 1910–16 January 1985) was a poet, critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students."Mitgang, Herbert (January 17, 1985). Robert Fitzgerald, 74, poet who translated the classics. "New York Times"]

He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin. In addition, he also composed several books of his own poetry.

Biography

Fitzgerald grew up in Springfield, Illinois and, when he was 18, attended The Choate School for a year before entering Harvard University in 1929. In 1931, while he was still a college student, a group of his poems were published in Poetry magazine. After his college graduation in 1933, he became a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune for a year. Later he worked several years for TIME magazine.

In World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy in Guam and Pearl Harbor. Later he was an instructor at Sarah Lawrence and Princeton University, poetry editor of The New Republic. He succeeded Archibald MacLeish as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard in 1965 and served until his retirement in 1981.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. From 1984 to 1985 he was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, the United States' equivalent of a national poet laureate. In 1984 Fitzgerald received a L.H.D. from Bates College.

Fitzgerald is widely known as one of the most poetic translators into the English language. He also served as literary executor to Flannery O'Connor, who was a boarder at his home in Redding, Connecticut, from 1949 to 1951. [Various sources incorrectly cite Ridgefield, Connecticut as Fitzgerald's home from the 1940s into the 1960s. He, in fact, lived on Seventy Acres Road in adjacent Redding, Connecticut. He and Flannery O'Connor used a Ridgefield mailing address because, in those days, rural delivery to that portion of Redding was done by the Ridgefield post office.] Fitzgerald's wife at the time, Sally Fitzgerald, compiled O'Connor's essays and letters after O'Connor's death.

Fitzgerald was married three times. He later moved to Hamden, Connecticut, where he died at home after a long illness.

Works

Greek and Latin translations

* Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus" (1961)
* Homer's "The Odyssey" (1961)
* Homer's "The Iliad" (1974)
* Virgil's "The Aeneid" (1983)With Dudley Fitts:
* Euripedes' "Alcestis" (1935)
* Sophocles' "Antigone" (1938)
* Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" (1948).

Other translations

* Paul Valery's "Three Verse Plays" (1960)
* St. John Perse's "Chronique" and "Birds" (1965)

Poems

* "Poems" (1935)
* "A Wreath for the Sea"
* "In the Rose of Time"
* "Spring Shade"

Other

* "Spring Shade" (poetry) 1971

* Editor, "The Collected Poems of James Agee" (1968)
* Editor, "The Collected Short Prose of James Agee" (1969)

External links

* [http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15938 Interview from "The Poet's Other Voice"]
* [http://harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/fitzgerald.php Robert Fitzgerald biography and example of poetry. Part of a series of poets.]

References

cite book
last =Homer
first = Trans. Robert Fitzgerald
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title ="The Odyssey"
publisher =Farrar, Straus and Giroux
year =1961
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