Robert Fitzgerald

Robert Stuart Fitzgerald (12 October 1910 – 16 January 1985) was an American poet, literary critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students". He is best known as a translator of ancient works of Homer and Virgil. He also composed several books of poetry.

Biography Fitzgerald was born in Geneva, New York, in 1910, in an Irish-American family. Both his parents were actors; his mother died when he was 3, his father when he was 17. He grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and graduated from The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he met Dudley Fitts, a poet. He entered Harvard in 1929, and in 1931 a number of his poems were published in Poetry magazine. After graduating from Harvard in 1933 he became a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune for a year.

Later he worked for several years for Time. In 1940, William Saroyan lists him among "associate editors" at Time in the play, Love's Old Sweet Song.

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 at Harvard in 1965 and served until his retirement in 1981.

Fitzgerald is widely known as one of the most poetic translators into the English language.

Fitzgerald served as literary executor to Flannery O'Connor, who was a boarder at his home in Redding, Connecticut, from 1949 to 1951. 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, and had six children. He later moved to Hamden, Connecticut, where he died at his home after a long illness. His friend, the poet Dudley Fitts, encouraged Fitzgerald to learn Greek. His first translation from Ancient Greek was of Euripides's Alcestis, done jointly with Fitts by mail.

As early as 1948, in his review of a prose translation of the Odyssey, Fitzgerald argued that poetry "should give us a more recognizable Homer than the prose men can supply" and translated the first lines of the poem.

Fitzgerald recalled that he read Richmond Lattimore's 1951 translation of the Iliad and admired it. He wrote a letter to Lattimore, asking whether he had thought about the Odyssey translation; at the time, Lattimore had no plans to. Fitzgerald then decided to do it himself. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, after a talk with Jason Epstein, a contract from Doubleday. The contract gave him "three thousand dollars a year for five years". Fitzgerald moved to Italy with his family, where they lived frugally, "no car, no refrigerator, no radio, no telephone—everything was very simple".

Fitzgerald lived in Italy from 1953; He traveled to Ithaca to get a sense of place and, as he recalled later, he found Homer's wine-dark sea there.

Fitzgerald taught Homer, Virgil, and Dante at Harvard for many years since the 1960s, requiring students who took his course to be fluent in at least two of the three languages of the poems. As the poet Dana Gioia recalled, Fitzgerald had his students memorize all characters of the poems, including minor ones: he thought that great poets introduced only significant characters into their works.