Amherst Reads About the Author

Robert Bagg '57, P'82 graduated from Amherst College (AB 1957) and the University Connecticut (PhD 1965). He has received fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Rome Prize) and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller (Bellagio) foundations, as well as grants from the NEA and NEH. He taught at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1963 to 1965, then at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from1965 to 1996. There he served as graduate director (1982–86) and chair  (1986–92) of the Department of English. He has published six books of poetry and twenty-one literary essays. His nine translations of Greek plays by Sophocles and Euripides have been staged in seventy-two productions worldwide. His translations of Antigone and Oedipus the King, which were first published by the University of Massachusetts Press and later (along with Oedipus at Kolonos, Elektra, and The Women of Trakhis) by HarperCollins in The Complete Plays of Sophocles, are included in the third edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. He lives with his wife, Mary, in Worthington, Massachusetts.

Mary Bagg, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, first collaborated with Robert Bagg in the late 1990s, coauthoring the notes and introductions for his translations of Sophocles in The Oedipus Cycle, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2004. She has been a freelance editor of nonfiction for more than a decade.

Current Home: Worthington, Massachusetts

Place of Birth: (RB) Millburn, NJ; (MB) Philadelphia, PA

Education: (RB) Amherst AB 1957, University of Connecticut PhD 1965; (MB) Pratt Institute (1968–70) and University of Massachusetts BA, 1997

Why did you choose to come to Amherst? (RB) My father was a member of the class of 1924, and he regularly brought our family to reunions. I applied to no other college.

Most memorable or most influential class at Amherst: (RB) Greek courses taught by Wendell Clausen, John Moore, and Thomas Gould opened me to Greek drama and the pleasures of translating Euripides and Sophocles for the stage. Also crucial was a special study course in writing verse taught by James Merrill in 1955–56.

Most memorable or most influential professor: (RB) Thomas Gould’s support and feedback, especially during my work translating Euripides’s The Bakkhai, was invaluable.

Research Interests?

(RB) After we finished our work on Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur, I returned to translating Greek drama (currently, Euripides’s Medea) and to completing a book of selected poems.

(MB) I have returned full-time to editing nonfiction for private clients as well as for several university presses. (My current project, ironically, is a biography of an inventor coauthored by a married couple!) I’ve edited books on a wide range of topics including climate change, sustainable energy, the sharing economy, art and art history, information technology, digital design and intelligence, and cyberbullying.

Awards and Prizes:

(RB) My first book of poems, Madonna of the Cello, was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the NBA. I received a Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for 1958–59, and have been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation (a Bellagio residency).

Favorite Book:

(RB) Richard Wilbur’s Collected Poems 1946–2004.

(MB) Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (having to choose just one book, I’s say that the psychological portrait of Julien in this novel, which I read in my early twenties, was and remains compelling.

Favorite Author:

(RB) Donna Leon (for her mysteries set in Venice)

(MB) Edna O’Brien

Tips for aspiring writers?

(RB) I would urge aspiring poets NOT to forgo iambic meter and rhyme. For millennia both have enhanced the dramatic tension in poetry and provided a structure for emphatic statement and various kinds of revelation. Free verse too easily devolves into prose. One’s prose, on the other hand, always benefits from incorporation of speech rhythms appropriate to conversation, dispute, oratory, and intimacy.

Tell us a bit about your path to becoming an author:

(RB) I’d published an early sonnet in the Atlantic while still at Amherst and, after winning the Prix de Rome, published my first book of poems in 1962. Several more volumes of poems followed. I began writing for the stage in Fall 1956 when Thomas Gould suggested to Ralph Lee that he ask me to translate Euripides’ short satyr play, Cyclops, for his senior project as a Theatre major. In 1962 I translated Euripides’ Hippolytos for Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press, then his Bakkhai for UMass Press. Most of these translations were also staged by college Theatre departments.

My dissertation was a study of the autobiographical impulse in lyric, beginning with Greek and Roman poets, and ending with several twentieth-century English and American poets. In 2005 I published an essay about the influence of Wilbur’s religious beliefs on his poetry, titled “Richard Wilbur’s Underheard Melodies,” in the North Dakota Quarterly. Wilbur and his wife Charlee liked the article, and subsequent conversations with them led to our writing the biography.

(MB) In midlife I returned to finish the undergraduate degree I’d abandoned when I chose a different career path as a young woman. But instead of going back to the fine arts and art history I’d studied at Pratt Institute in the late 1960s, I studied literature at UMass Amherst, where I won several writing prizes and completed an Honors Thesis of creative nonfiction. Then, combining my love of the arts with my writing, I began to review museum exhibitions, books, and theatrical productions for an alternative weekly newspaper, where I also discovered a passion and aptitude for editing the writing of others. Working with Bob developed from informal editing and commenting on his prose, to coauthoring the notes and introductions in his UMass Press volume The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles in 2004. Our collaboration on the biography grew from our shared research in the Wilbur archives at Amherst and interviews with both Richard and Charlee Wilbur beginning in 2005.