Datasets:

yoonholee
/

homer-parallel-translations

work stringclasses 2 values	author stringclasses 1 value	book_number int64 1 24	translator stringclasses 7 values	year int64 1.72k 1.9k	style stringclasses 3 values	gutenberg_id int64 1.73k 24.3k	text stringlengths 17.5k 162k	char_count int64 17.5k 162k	word_count int64 3.04k 27.6k
Iliad	Homer	1	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	ARGUMENT.[40] THE CONTENTION OF ACHILLES AND AGAMEMNON. In the war of Troy, the Greeks having sacked some of the neighbouring towns, and taken from thence two beautiful captives, Chryseïs and Briseïs, allotted the first to Agamemnon, and the last to Achilles. Chryses, the father of Chryseïs, and priest of Apollo, c...	36,497	6,304
Iliad	Homer	2	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	Jupiter, in pursuance of the request of Thetis, sends a deceitful vision to Agamemnon, persuading him to lead the army to battle, in order to make the Greeks sensible of their want of Achilles. The general, who is deluded with the hopes of taking Troy without his assistance, but fears the army was discouraged by his ab...	48,629	8,187
Iliad	Homer	3	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	The armies being ready to engage, a single combat is agreed upon between Menelaus and Paris (by the intervention of Hector) for the determination of the war. Iris is sent to call Helen to behold the fight. She leads her to the walls of Troy, where Priam sat with his counsellers observing the Grecian leaders on the plai...	26,679	4,645
Iliad	Homer	4	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	The gods deliberate in council concerning the Trojan war: they agree upon the continuation of it, and Jupiter sends down Minerva to break the truce. She persuades Pandarus to aim an arrow at Menelaus, who is wounded, but cured by Machaon. In the meantime some of the Trojan troops attack the Greeks. Agamemnon is disting...	29,559	5,121
Iliad	Homer	5	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	"Diomed, assisted by Pallas, performs wonders in this day’s battle.\nPandarus wounds him with an a(...TRUNCATED)	51,512	8,859
Iliad	Homer	6	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	"The gods having left the field, the Grecians prevail. Helenus, the\nchief augur of Troy, commands H(...TRUNCATED)	31,079	5,360
Iliad	Homer	7	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	"The battle renewing with double ardour upon the return of Hector,\nMinerva is under apprehensions f(...TRUNCATED)	27,546	4,780
Iliad	Homer	8	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	"Jupiter assembles a council of the deities, and threatens them with the\npains of Tartarus if they (...TRUNCATED)	33,415	5,729
Iliad	Homer	9	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	"Agamemnon, after the last day’s defeat, proposes to the Greeks to quit\nthe siege, and return to (...TRUNCATED)	38,155	6,621
Iliad	Homer	10	Alexander Pope	1,720	heroic couplets	6,130	"Upon the refusal of Achilles to return to the army, the distress of\nAgamemnon is described in the (...TRUNCATED)	31,552	5,478

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Homer Parallel Translations

Book-aligned parallel translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey by six and four English translators respectively, spanning four centuries of translation practice (1611-1900). All public domain in the US. Intended as a reference set for studying translator taste: each translator made distinct stylistic and interpretive choices on the same source text, and the dataset lets you compare them passage-by-passage.

240 records = 24 books × (6 Iliad + 4 Odyssey translators).

Iliad (144 records)

Translator	Year	Style
George Chapman	1611	fourteeners (not included -- different book-marker convention)
Alexander Pope	1720	heroic couplets
William Cowper	1791	blank verse
Theodore Alois Buckley	1851	prose
Edward Smith-Stanley (Earl of Derby)	1864	blank verse
Lang, Leaf & Myers	1883	prose (literary archaism)
Samuel Butler	1898	prose (plain)

Odyssey (96 records)

Translator	Year	Style
Alexander Pope	1725	heroic couplets
William Cowper	1791	blank verse
Butcher & Lang	1879	prose
Samuel Butler	1900	prose

Schema

Column	Type	Description
`work`	string	"Iliad" or "Odyssey"
`author`	string	"Homer"
`book_number`	int	Book number, 1-24
`translator`	string	Translator name
`year`	int	Approximate publication year
`style`	string	Verse / prose style descriptor
`gutenberg_id`	int	Project Gutenberg book ID
`text`	string	Full text of the book in this translation
`char_count`	int	Character count
`word_count`	int	Word count

Why this exists

If you want to train or evaluate a model's taste for translation as interpretation, you need the same source text rendered by multiple expert hands. Modern translations of classical texts are almost all in copyright. Homer has the advantage that every major English translation from 1611 to 1900 is public domain, giving you a dense spectrum of translation philosophies on identical source material -- from Chapman's Elizabethan fourteeners through Pope's Augustan couplets to Butler's Victorian plain prose.

Use cases:

Style classification: given a passage, predict the translator.
Pairwise taste: "which rendering of this passage is more faithful? More beautiful? More readable today?"
Evaluation rubric development: what makes a great translation? Build eval components from dimensions where translators visibly disagree.
Few-shot prompting: given a new passage of Homer, generate a translation in the style of Pope, Butler, etc.

Source books

ID	Title	Translator
6130	The Iliad	Pope
16452	The Iliad of Homer	Cowper
6150	The Iliad	Derby
22382	The Iliad	Buckley
3059	The Iliad	Lang, Leaf & Myers
2199	The Iliad	Butler
3160	The Odyssey	Pope
24269	The Odyssey of Homer	Cowper
1728	The Odyssey of Homer	Butcher & Lang
1727	The Odyssey	Butler

Parsing notes

Each translation was split on "BOOK I / II / ..." markers (or "BOOK THE FIRST / SECOND / ..." for Buckley). The first set of marker hits in each file corresponds to the table of contents, so we kept the last occurrence of each book number -- the one inside the body. Argument summaries, illustration tags, and footnote markers were stripped where regex-detectable; some editorial cruft remains. Chapman's 1611 Iliad uses a different book-marker convention and is not yet parsed into this release.

Book-level alignment means you can compare e.g. Butler's Book IX to Pope's Book IX, but passage-level alignment (individual lines or verses) would require a separate alignment pass -- the translations do not preserve line numbering and their structural choices differ.