When the American academic, poet and translator Robert Fagles went on tour with his Odyssey, it was said that there were people in the audience who believed he actually was Homer. He was too modest to fall victim to that illusion and anyway not a one-author translator, having already produced versions of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Before his death in 2008, he turned his hand to Latin and the Aeneid. Yet he wasn’t a classicist, or not by today’s specialised academic standards. Least of all was he an authority in the relatively new field of translation studies.

Homer was lucrative for Fagles, as he had been for an earlier immensely popular translator, Alexander Pope. Whether or not anyone thought Pope was Homer, his version is very 18th-century, and very English. A modern critic described the effect as ‘Homer in a powdered wig declaiming in a baroque theatre’. If that sounds dire, the often observed but still strange fact is that although great works of literature remain themselves, they need retranslating for every generation in every language. And more than once, it seems. A decent interval after Fagles, Emily Wilson has produced acclaimed versions of both Homeric epics. But in each case, and in English alone, more than fifteen others have been published in the past quarter-century.

Why this glossal glut? The speed of cultural change, perhaps, plus the publishing industry’s instinct that whatever wins a jackpot is worth copying. The author of If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation doesn’t, however, make his own living quite this way. Daniel Hahn is a