alt Hacker NewsThe Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
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This is a useful marker of progress in translation, not a replacement for literary translators.
Six years ago I fed Dante's Inferno to AWS translation. It was...not good[1]. Maybe its time to try again and see how things have changed.
[1] https://github.com/ffx271/dante-inferno/blob/master/english/...
12,107 line-for-line translation of the A.T. Murray Greek text (Loeb, 1919) by Claude Fable. Includes line notes and an index. HTML, epub, pdf, and YouTube Audio (by gpt4o-TTS). A dual-agent review pass was done on the entire work with a third "adjudication" agent reconciling their findings. Reviewer agnets were gpt-5.6-sol high reasoning.
This could allow a very opinionated and tailored translation, which I think is the appeal.
That said, I'd like to see the prompt(s) having such an effect on the subjective choices for a project like this.
This page provides a great overview of several popular translations of The Odyssey. It lists line-by-line translations as well free translations: https://readtheodyssey.org/best-odyssey-translation
Read this as "Claudussy" at first.
Having recently read Wilson's translation, I was immediately put off at the introduction and leapt to the conclusion it was bad. It just doesn't sound anywhere near as good to my ear.
However, there may be more to it than I thought. No admittedly the following is ChatGPT's opinion, but I think it's valid and made me think again:
> The second is the better translation as English poetry; the first (Claude's) is the better translation if you want to see the Greek more directly.
> If I were studying Homer, I'd strongly prefer the first. It continually reminds you that you're reading an ancient poem whose concepts don't map neatly onto modern English.
Probably this will be done more and more often for works which don't have translation in some language because of low interest. E.g. old manuscripts, light novels, fan fiction etc.
I'm just curious why you'd put "Claud[e]" in the name of this project. Is it an Anthropic-sponsored one? If so, may you please disclose it? Additionally, I think it puts a date to a wonderful project that otherwise could be very timeless. In 5 years we'll probably be like, "what's Claude?" Anyway, really cool work and thanks for sharing!
A language model does language model things? That might actually be... an appropriate use of the technology!
What is the point of this?
How does it compare to previous (human) translations, what is the regurgitation level? In any case, lots of em dashes, so mission accomplished to bring it up to contemporary standards.