Robert Fagles, for many years Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, was the author of some of the most successful modern translations of classical literature, and one of the rare few to tackle all three of the great epics, Homer's Iliad (1990) and Odyssey (1996) and Virgil's Aeneid (2006).

He distinguished himself by producing translations that were not only faithful to the original but fresh and accessible for the contemporary reader, an arresting combination of poetic and demotic.

The publication of the Homer epics came at a time of considerable growth in the translation industry, and their popularity - both became bestsellers - did something to allay fears about illiteracy and dumbing down. As Fagles said: “The great joy of this work was to discover that there is in fact a great number of very intelligent, hardworking readers out there.”

The poet Paul Muldoon, a colleague at Princeton, described Fagles as a “quiet man, diligent and decorous, yet one who was unexpectedly equal to the swagger and savagery of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in a way no one had managed before him. It was as if two key texts of Western literature had been adapted by a director of Westerns like Leone or Peckinpah.”

Fagles said that he did not want to be too literal or too literary, and quoted W.H. Auden in saying that his role was like providing Braille for the blind. He recognised, too, that other such guides would be needed for future generations: “In a sense, all translations are unfinished,” he said. “One thing I have learnt is that no one will have the final say.”

Robert Fagles was born in 1933 in Philadelphia. He went to Amherst College, where he originally intended to study medicine but switched to English, and studied Greek and Latin on the side; soon he had “Homer on the brain”. He was much inspired by Richmond Lattimore's Iliad and greatly admired Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey, though his own approach to translation would differ greatly: “Both were more interested in translating Homer into a literary artefact than in producing a kind of performance,” he said.

His father had died when he was 14, and he was particularly moved by the passage in The Iliad where Andromache grieves not only for her dead husband but also for her fatherless child: “It wasn't just that I could identify with the situation,” he told The New York Times in 2006, “but that the text took that situation and made it universal.”

After graduating Fagles did a doctorate at Yale where, in his spare time, he worked on Greek translations - of Pindar, a number of tragedies and sections of Homer. He then taught there for a year before joining the department of English at Princeton in 1960. He published his first translation, of the complete poems of Bacchylides, the following year.

This was followed, in the 1970s, by a translation of the Oresteia, the tragic trilogy by Aeschylus. “There are two ways in which a translator can set about a new version,” The Times wrote on its publication. “He can rewrite the plays, recognising the themes but relentlessly recasting the dialogue in the poetic idiom of his own time, paying only lip service to real accuracy; or he can prepare a straightforward crib, relentlessly accurate but for that very reason useless except to the advanced student. Professor Fagles tried to have it both ways, and succeeds.”

His translation of the three Theban plays of Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus (1982) was similarly well received, and when his Iliad was published eight years later (followed closely by an audio version recorded with Derek Jacobi) The New York Times summarised it in its bestseller list as “a terse, plain, direct and rapid version...the introduction makes concrete the best contemporary scholarship”.

There were some, however, who thought the translation too free. Peter Jones, for example, wrote in The Times: “Line after line of Fagles responds neither to the content nor argument of the Greek. I find no poetic quid pro quo of the sort that Pope's Iliad lavishes on us in abundance, but lame invention and tired line-filling.” He quoted a line which in the Greek means simply “She spoke and named her”, which Fagles had translated as “She breathed her name in a throbbing, rising voice”.

Fagles made similar editorial decisions in his Odyssey, published in 1996 (and once again followed by a magisterial audio version, with Ian McKellen), introducing poetic variation. One much used phrase, “resourceful Odysseus”, for example, he amended variously to “the man of all occasions”, “the great tactician” and “the great teller of tales”, explaining this in his postscript with reference to “the ways we read today”.

Jones, once again, was disappointed, writing that Homer's repetitive language - and the omission of detail so that the reader or listener could fill it in himself - was an important feature: “There is no point in reading Homer if he is not allowed to be Homer.” But Fagles said that, if he left the phrase “resourceful Odysseus” to stand on all occasions, he would feel resourceless.

Either way, the text is powerful:

“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.

Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,

Many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,

fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.”

Fagles published his Aeneid, a ten-year project, in 2006. It was followed by an audio version with Simon Callow. Unlike other translators he told the story in the present tense to add vividness and tension, and used a five or six-beat line “while leaning more to six” to reflect Virgil's flexibility. He said of his interpretation: “I wanted to convey something about the modern understanding of war, and then about a man, an exile, a common soldier left terribly alone in the field of battle. Aeneas is like Clint Eastwood, like Gary Cooper, a warrior and a worrier. He changes into the heroic tragic man, duty and endure, endure and duty.”

Fagles was appointed director of Princeton's comparative literature programme in 1966. It became a separate department in 1975 and he was its chair from 1975 to 1994. His areas of special interest included the classical tradition in English and European literature and interrelationships between the arts, and his course on epic poetry was among the university's most popular. He published a collection of original poetry, I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh, in 1978.

Fagles received the US National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Ralph Manheim prize for lifetime achievement and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He retired from the Princeton faculty in 2002.

He is survived by Lynne, his wife of 51 years, and two daughters.

Professor Robert Fagles, translator and Classical scholar, was born on September 11, 1933. He died of cancer on March 26, 2008, aged 74