Paul Roche was a poet, classical scholar, novelist and translator. He made his name in the 1960s with two collections of poetry, All Things Considered and To Tell the Truth, and was well known for his faithful but fresh translations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho and Plautus, some of which are still standard texts in schools and universities in Europe and the US. His reputation was enhanced by good looks and stylishly flamboyant clothes.

He was also known for his relationship with the Post-Impressionist Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant, whom he met while crossing the road at Piccadilly Circus 1946. At the time Roche was serving as a curate at St Mary's, Cadogan Gardens, a Roman Catholic church. They spent the evening drinking rum and looking at pictures, and soon they were seeing each other regularly, Roche posing for paintings. The relationship was to last - albeit for some of the time at a distance - until Grant's death in 1978.

Paul Roche was born in 1916 in Mussamp;#35;oorie, India. His mother was the daughter of an Armenian aristocrat, his father a captain in the Royal Engineers and later an engineer for Great India Peninsular Railways. Before his mother's death from smallpox in 1927 he was sent to a preparatory school in the North of England.amp;#33;

All three children were then sent to board, the boys to Ushaw College, Durham, one of the first Catholic schools to be established after the Reformation. There Roche learnt Latin and Greek and got up at five every morning. He was captivated by the Catholic rituals - the boys went to Mass every day - and thought of himself becoming a saint or a priest. Aged 13 he read The Hound of Heaven and was “bowled over. I did not understand it for many years, but it was magical, wonderful. I knew all about it in my solar plexus.”

An anxious boy, he left to go to the Ealing Priory School as a day pupil - his father had remarried and was living in Hanwell, in West London - and then to St Edmund's College in Ware. After a meeting with Cardinal Hinsley, the Archbishop of Westminster, it was then decided that he would continue his studies in Rome. He arrived at the English College, part of the Gregorian University there, in 1936, and studied philosophy and theology. But when war broke out and Italy joined forces with Germany in 1940, he returned to England and went to St Mary's Hall at Stonyhurst where young Jesuits were trained. He was ordained priest in 1943.

He spent a year as chaplain to three different convents in Isleworth, and was then chosen - as someone who “looked ornamental and was apparently endowed with intelligence, conscientiousness and charm” - as assistant personal secretary to Cardinal Griffin, the new Archbishop of Westminster. However, it became clear that he was uncertain of his vocation, and his father eventually had him officially secularised.

When Roche met Grant, he did not tell him for some time about his religous background (when he did Grant was amazed). Roche moved into a flat in Taviton Street belonging to Marjorie Strachey, the sister of Lytton Strachey, and for the next eight years he and Grant spent much of their time together, putting Grant's relationship with Vanessa Bell, with whom he had a daughter, under some strain.

Eventually Roche retired from his religious duties. He had relationships with women - Mary Blundell, a physicist studying at London University, had a son by him - and, encouraged by Grant, started writing. For several consecutive summers he explored France, Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Ibiza, Elba and North Africa. “Those were the days of my gradual cure, my slow way back to humanity,” he wrote.

Roche's career as a writer was beginning to take off. A book of fables, The Rat and the Convent Dove, was published in 1952, and short stories appeared in several magazines (an interview with Salvador Dalí, whom he met on the Costa Brava, was also sold to Town and Country).

In 1954 he married Clarissa Tanner, going to live with her parents in Michigan, and published a novel, O Pale Galilean, an allegory of the relation of humanism to Christianity in which a satyr enters into the body of a young seminarist to try to win his soul for the Devil. It led to an offer from Smith College in Massachusetts to join its English department.

Roche and Clarissa became friends with Sylvia Plath, who was also a member of the faculty, and Ted Hughes (though Plath described Roche in unflattering terms in her journal, referring to his “professional dewy blue-eyed look and his commercially gilded and curled blond hair on his erect, dainty, bored aristocratic head”).

In 1958 — the year that Grant decorated the Russell Chantry at Lincoln Cathedral using Roche as the model for Christ — Roche published The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles, having been inspired by an unsatisfactory translation he was reading to his wife, and was awarded a Bollingen Foundation Fellowship. Contracts and advances for translations for The Orestes Plays of Aeschylus followed; they would be described by Edith Hamilton, the classicist and writer on mythology, as the best she had ever read.

The Roches eventually left with their two children to live on the island of Nevis in the West Indies — the appeal being the sun and the low cost of living - and then spent two years in Taxco, southern Mexico, where their third child was born. In 1961 Vanessa Bell died, and Roche went to visit Grant. Not long afterwards Roche and his family settled in Aldermaston, Berkshire, buying and restoring an old stable, and Roche began to visit Grant regularly in Charleston.

Meanwhile, Roche published, in 1964, a second novel, Vessel of Dishonour, a love story based on his experiences as a priest. It was criticised by some members of the Catholic Church, who deemed it immoral, while John Betjeman thought it “a fanciful allegory which just comes off”. (Roche himself later called it “terrible”.)

More successful was his screenplay for Oedipus the King (1967), which starred Orson Welles, Christopher Plummer and Lili Palmer. The Times critic John Russell Taylor called it a “thoroughly workable version”, observing that it struck “a happy middle level between self-conscious archaising

and equally self-conscious modern colloquialism”.

Roche continued to publish poetry, and gave readings, working with such actresses as Flora Robson, Sybil Thorndike, Diana Rigg and Vivian Merchant. Poetry, he said, “is bound up with the rhythm of the heart, of breathing, the rhythm of birth, death, marriage and the slow ritual of learning...I want people to feel that they've been through everything, have purged and can face life again.”

Roche became poet-in-residence at the California Institute of the Arts in 1972, discovering he had considerable talent and enthusiasm for teaching. Work at other US universities followed, including Centenary College, New Jersey, Albion College (where he received a doctorate), Emory & Henry in Virginia and later the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

Roche was also able to devote more time to Grant. In 1973 they went together to Turkey, after which Roche published With Duncan Grant in Southern Turkey (1982), and in 1975 they spent six months in Tangier, where he nursed Grant through nearly terminal pneumonia. He was devastated when, in 1978, Grant died at the age of 93 of bronchial pneumonia.

Roche's marriage was dissolved in 1983. In 1985 he bought a house in Sóller, on the northwest coast of Majorca, where, surrounded by Grant's pictures, he continued with Greek translations and fables, and, working from the Ancient Greek, produced The Bible's Greatest Stories (1990).

He also wrote a Cooking with a Poet series, and A Visit to India (1996), the result of his return, after 69 years, to India, where he spent six months backpacking with his daughter Mitey.

Roche is survived by the son of his relationship with Mary Blundell and the son and three daughters of his marriage to Clarissa Tanner.

Paul Roche, poet, scholar, novelist and translator, was born on September 25, 1916. He died on October 30, 2007, aged 91