What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.
Men's lives are short . The hard man and his cruelties will be Cursed behind his back and mocked in death. But one whose heart and ways are kind - of him strangers will bear report to the whole wide world, and distant men will praise him. - Penelope in Robert Fitzgerald trans. THE ODYSSEY (364)
