alt Hacker News> Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, The Death of Socrates and a biography of Seneca. She has also translated Seneca and Euripides as well as both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.
Writing a screenplay adaptation of a poem and writing a translation in contemporary language are entirely different endeavors.