[nemo]

"man of many turns" is at least a better translation than "complicated man" which feels to me like a bit of a travesty to translate polytropos into. Polytropos literally has the roots of "many" and "turn" in it, "complicated" is not there. Lattimore was a literalist and his translation's weird for that but more fair to the Greek than what I've seen of Wilson's translation. Wilson takes the Fagles approach, but modernizes it.

For the record I can still recite the first book of Homer in Greek so I have opinions.

[tptacek]

She wasn't making an argument for the verisimilitude of her translation, just a comment about how detached the most popular English translations are from the source text; some of what's in those translations is literally invented, to fit a vibe.

[nemo]

Yes, every translation is an interpretation, none can capture what the original Homeric Greek means in English, all make some kinds of compromises. It is work noting that it is absolutely the case that some of what's Emily Wilson's translation is literally invented to fit a vibe - see "complicated man" which is not only not what the Greek says, but also violates the spirit of what the Greek says.