“How much you enjoy the prose” doesn’t really seem like the metric by which we should rank these? I’d prefer to read whatever’s most faithful to the original, which isn’t measured here.
There are at least two possible meanings of “faithful,” which are “translates the literal meaning most accurately” and “evokes the same feeling most poetically.” Given that it’s Homer and not Aristotle, the vibes-based approach is probably the right criterion. It’s a bit hard to express but, having read a lot of Homer in Greek, I can say that some of these translations absolutely fail to translate Homer even if there’s nothing inaccurate per se.
Translation = words + intent. Literal translation frequently loses the intent encoded into the chosen language, especially for creative writing. If I translate "youre a real piece of work" literally into another language, Ive likely lost the entire point of the phrase. Should we prefer that translation instead of one that either spells out the underhandedness of the comment in the other language? Or which replaces it with its own approximately similar idiom?
“The epic has 12109 lines composed in dactylic hexameter, sometimes called Homeric hexameter—a metre with six metrical feet. The form of hexameter is catalectic, meaning that it lacks an expected syllable in the last foot. Each line has between twelve and seventeen syllables and generally forms a grammatically complete sentence.”
Im wrapping a lot of that up into "intent". If they intended it to rhyme, then you will necessarily "lose something" in translation. The same with elegant word choice to fit within certain metre, etc. Sure, a direct translation might be faithful to a more esoteric word choice but it completely loses sight of why that word was chosen in the mother language.
Thiss is a very good example. Consider the difference between "he's hard working" and "he's hard work". My wife ran into this when some German co-workers were describing a colleague.
This also doesnt touch on translation also having an element of the audience in it as well. You see this in debates on what the best translation of the Odyssey is, with some preferring one version for being more "classical" in language and others preferring a more modern take. I would argue they can both be right, as its perfectly valid to choose turns of phrase that the intended audience will understand vs those which they wont. Language evolves over time.
They mean "a faithful translation" where "original" means whatever Greek version was chosen to be the source not "original" as in the first text from Homer.
As others have said, this is covered in the "What's the most accurate translation?" section, with examples of Textual, Poetic, and Interpretive fidelity differences.
The Emily Wilson translation begins with an extensive introduction covering the things you have to balance when doing a translation, translation choices, some faults or misleading choices she believes some other translations have made, why she made the choices she did and her reasoning and goals behind them, etc. It is well worth the read to help understand that there is no one way to be "faithful" to the original.
I've read Fagles and Wilson, so I am certainly no scholar on the subject.
There's a section in the report "what's the most accurate translation" - tldr it's complicated. Presumably the top 8 translations by popularity pass some threshold of credibility.