It's worth noting that there are very many translations which manage to mangle the verse without needing to go through the steps twice.
It's also worth noting that the first of Ezra Pound's
Cantos is, primarily, a double translation of the
Odyssey, being a translation into English of a Renaissance Latin translation by Andreas Divus. And it is incredibly striking in its language:
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Crice's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wreteched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Guy Davenport - the remarkable poet, story-writer, critic (of culture and literature), translator, and an all around astute man - has a very good essay (which predates Fagles translation, to be fair) on the merits of various tranlations of Homer. It's called "Another Odyssey", and is in his large book of essays
The Geography of Criticism, alongside pieces on the work of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Jonathan Williams, and many other remarkable things. You can read most of the essay
here. The Davenport book really is worth tracking down though, as is pretty well everything else he wrote or translated; over the past year, he has perhaps been the writer I've been returning to the most often.
Honourable mentions to Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Bringhurt, Jan Zwicky, Hilary Mantel, Dennis Lee, Jane Austen and Marilynne Robinson though.
