Now have it make it into a movie.
Christopher Nolan beat you to it
I mean let Claude make it into a movie. A task which is quite possible.
The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
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Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
#22This 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.
Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
#23Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
#24How 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.
https://theclaudyssey.com/read/book-01.html#n1 The first line is a crappy mishmash of Lattimore and Fagles. Lattimore: >Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel. Fagles: >Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. Claude: >Tell me the man, Muse — the…
The sort of sad but interesting thing here is that while this claims to be a more direct translation, Claude models were certainly trained on all of the pre-existing translations and this is likely going to directly influence the output in the ways you've outlined here. I'm not sure any modern LLM could honestly be claimed to produce a translation that doesn't draw on these pre-existing sources.
Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
#25This 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/...
Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
#26Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
#2712,107 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.
why?
One very simple benefit is that it's unencumbered by copyright.
I do value the work of human translators; when they're really in harmony with the original work, they can be fantastic. But they can also be disastrous, like Alfred Birnbaum's translations of Murakami, which radically reshapes the protagonist and threw out nearly 20% of the original work.
Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
#28A language model does language model things? That might actually be... an appropriate use of the technology!
Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
#29I don't remember so many emdashes in the original.
Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
#30How 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.
https://theclaudyssey.com/read/book-01.html#n1 The first line is a crappy mishmash of Lattimore and Fagles. Lattimore: >Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel. Fagles: >Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. Claude: >Tell me the man, Muse — the…
The 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.