alt Hacker NewsThe only thing Fable was given was a clean of copy of the ancient Greek. This is not a bastardization of other translations. I appreciate and value the critical feedback in any case (truly).
I find that Fagles is very majestic -wonderful, really- but he's also very liberal (poetically) and definitely did not limit himself to the same number of lines as Homer as this project did.
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As another comment here points out, Fable likely had multiple translations, academic literature about the text, and maybe the original as well, in its training set. So even if only the original Greek was given to it as input it probably leveraged prior art when translating it.
> The only thing Fable was given was a clean of copy of the ancient Greek
Ok, but this clearly combines a few translations line by line if you work through it.
You think Anthropic didn't train on some of the most famous translations of the Odyssey? Really?
> The only thing Fable was given was a clean of copy of the ancient Greek. This is not a bastardization of other translations
FWIW I gave GPT-5.5 two lines of William Cowper's translation (long out of copyright to avoid any filters) without web search and not only was it able to identify it, it was able to continue it verbatim for roughly 30 lines at which point it went off course, but only by skipping like two books ahead. If I had supplied the original text as an anchor it presumably could have kept going.
I didn't try it with Fable because I'm lazy, but all these translations (presumably the ones within copyright too, given the lawsuits) are definitely well known by these models.