"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy."

With these famous words begins the Odyssey according to Robert Fagles, renowned translator of Homer's epics. Fagles, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton University, gave a reading of some poignant passages from the Odyssey Saturday at Princeton's Taplin Auditorium.

Winner of the 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 1997 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, Fagles' translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey are considered the standard, authoritative versions of these classics.

In the Iliad, Odysseus cleverly plans to hide Greek warriors in a wooden horse that they deliver as a "gift" to the Trojans and the Greeks successfully defeat Troy by the surprise attack. But going home after the war isn't so simple. Odysseus wanders for 10 years on the way back to Ithaca and runs into all sorts of adventures chronicled in the Odyssey.

Fagles started translating the Odyssey in 1976 when his mother died. He decided to write his own English version of the episode where Odysseus, who had left his mother alive in Ithaca 20 years before, finds her dead in the Underworld.

Odysseus longs to hold his mother and rushes toward her three times, but "three times she flustered through my fingers, sifting away like a shadow," Fagles read.

"This is just the way of mortals when we die," the mother tells Odysseus. "Sinews no longer bind the flesh and bones together - the fire in all its fury burns the body, down to ashes once life slips from the white bones, and the spirit rustling, flitters away . . . flown like a dream."

Like a musical performance, each translation of Homer's classics is different, he said. Two orchestras will give very different performances of the same symphony and two translators will give different impressions of the same piece of writing.

"Any translation, reading or performance of Homer is a form of interpretation, a form of vision," he said.

The most difficult parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey to translate are the moments such as the Iliad's River Battle that "blow you away," he said. These passages challenged him to "go over the top" with his writing and "subject language to pressure to the point where it almost bursts," he said.

When he began translating the Iliad, he started with a few scenes, including the River Battle, to see if he could command a suitable voice.

Though the Iliad and the Odyssey are nearly 3,000 years old, people still search for ties between the great poems of battle and current world events. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Fagles received several phone calls from major news sources asking about connections to Homer's epics.

"The Associated Press asked, `Is there a Rumsfeld in the Iliad?' I said, `No, but isn't one enough?' " he told the Princeton audience.

In mythology courses students often learn about the Greek gods as stiff, statuelike and awesome, he said. Homer makes these characters such as Zeus more real, and closer to us, he said.

Fagles' current translation project, Virgil's Aeneid, is a "violent poem, a sad poem," he said. The protagonist is abandoned by the gods and loses his wife for the price of an empire. Virgil tells us the hardship is worth it, but it's still a tough call, he said. He hopes to finish the translation during the winter.

One of the most gratifying parts about doing translations is the readers, he said.

"There are many people out there reading, hungry for reading," he said. "If you don't publish, you'll never have the rejuvenation of readers."