![\"Robert](\"\/translation\/files\/2015\/09\/Fitzgerald-photo.jpg\")
<\/a>Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was born in 1910 in Geneva, Switzerland, and grew up in Springfield, Illinois. As an undergraduate at Harvard, where he studied Classics, he published a number of poems in Poetry<\/em> magazine, the leading American journal of poetry.<\/p>\n After graduating in 1933, Fitzgerald embarked on a career as a journalist, work he pursued successfully until the outbreak of WWII. Fitzgerald enlisted in the Navy in 1943 and later served in Guam and at Pearl Harbor. After the war, he was an instructor of poetry at Sarah Lawrence and Princeton, and poetry editor of the New Republic<\/em>. In 1952, having received a Guggenheim Fellowship, he moved with his family to Italy to begin a four-year project translating the Odyssey. <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>Asked about this period of his life in an interview in 1970, Fitzgerald said:<\/p>\n “Think of having before you every morning lines of beautiful Greek with the challenge of trying to match them in English, trying to make something as lightly running, as graceful, as sinewy and as interesting\u2026 and at the same time to avoid any stunting, metrical and otherwise, that might distract a reader from the main thing, which was always the dramatic action and narrative.”<\/p>\n Once published, Fitzgerald\u2019s translation of Homer was immediately hailed by critics as \u201ca masterpiece,\u201d and as \u201cthe best and truest Odyssey in the English language.\u201d Fitzgerald stayed in Italy a total of eleven years, but returned to the US every now and then to teach. In 1964 he returned to Harvard as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position he held until his retirement in 1981.<\/p>\n The idea for creating the prize and naming it for Fitzgerald came from Professors Rodolfo Cardona and Rosanna Warren, the founders of the translation seminar at BU. When they approached Robert Fitzgerald with this idea, he responded as follows:<\/p>\n