I asked AI to find a translation of "The Odyssey" according to how I wanted to read it. It couldn't find any. So I asked it to create a translation to those specifications. This project is the result, plus the "style-bible" so that you can ask an AI to regenerate something similar.
What I want is this:
- No attempts to make "poetry", such as dactylic hexameter or iambic pentameter. That's not "translation" but the author rewriting their own poetry. I want prose, like in a novel.
- No modernisation of themes for modern audiences. That's not "translation" but writing the authors own story. I want to know what ancient Greek's thought.
- I want it to change words, like "Greeks" for "Acheans", and annotations like "Artemis (goddess of the hunt)" on the first mention in every book/chapter. Modern readers are hazy on Greek mythology.
- I want a narrator to interrupt to explain thigns ancient Greeks understood but modern readers miss, as well as add footnotes. A good style is the way Tolkien's narrator is almost a character in the novel.
That's roughly my original prompt. This grew into a "style bible" as the translation progressed, where the AI kept track of things. The narrator did a good job telling me about what was coming in future books/chapters, and then later, refering back to past books/chapters, even though I asked to translate each book/chapter at a time.
What I wanted was the narrator to sound like Tolkien, as in:
What is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People,
But it kept drifting to those short punchy sentences that hammer you, the sort of thing AI loves (not just Claude).
I kept having to re-prompt it, so you'll see a change in the narration style from book to book.
I kept prompting a single Claude session to generate the next book, but this failed after book 22, because of context lengths I suppose. So I took the STYLE-BOOK and started a new session. You can see how much book 22 looks different from book 23. But really, the content is the same, so I'm not going to try to clean it up. You get to see things as I saw it, and regenerate things if you want something different.
