Robert Fagles to present address
GAMBIER, Ohio (September 5, 2003) The distinguished classicist and translator Robert Fagles has been chosen by President S. Georgia Nugent as the guest speaker for the Saturday, October 25, inauguration ceremony. The installation will take place at 2:30 p.m. on the lawn of Kenyon's Samuel Mather Hall. Fagles, the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, will also give a reading at 11:15 a.m. on Saturday morning in the Brandi Recital Hall of Storer Hall.A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fagles received the academy's 1996 Award in Literature for his translation of The Odyssey. Among the honors bestowed on him for his earlier translation of The Iliad was the 1991 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the American Academy of Poets. Fagles has also won acclaim for his translations of Sophocles's Three Theban Plays and Aeschylus's Oresteia, the latter of which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1977.
Kenyon will inaugurate Nugent as the College's eighteenth president during the weekend of October 24-26. The inaugural theme, "To Seek a Newer World," is drawn from Alfred Tennyson's poem Ulysses. Evoking Nugent's scholarship and her love of the classics, the theme symbolizes exploration and engagement across academic divisions, between ancient and modern learning, and between Kenyon and its surroundings.