Back to the classical tradition -

the first real chestnut from the Nigel Wilson book "From Byzantium to Italy" is his account of the exploits of one Leonzio Pilato, a Calabrian teacher of Greek who was tapped by Boccacio and Petrarch to produce a Latin translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Pilato did as he was asked, but his word-for-word translation of the Greek into its corresponding (at times torturously so) Latin was hailed as mediocre in its time and is mostly derided today by classicists and Renaissance scholars, who were of course judging the work on its literary merits. But I'm not sure Pilato's idea was an artistic one, nor was it an altogether bad idea at all, given the state of Greek studies in Fourteenth Century Italy, which was virtually nonexistent. I believe the modern-day Loeb series of Latin and Greek authors with facing translation is a good example of what Pilato was getting at - students in Classics today routinely use the Loebs when required to read large swaths of an author, not just as a "cheat" but because most Loeb translations happen to hew rather slavishly to the original, allowing a student to see how to get from point A to point B grammatically without having to reach for the commentary, the lexicon, or Smyth's Greek Grammar.

Given that the literati of the early Italian Renaissance knew their Latin inside out, and Latin was a language just as highly inflected as Greek, Pilato's solution of a word-for-word translation for Homer is really a bit of genius, enabling scholars interested in ancient Greek to peer within into its grammatical innards with a fair degree of transparency. Now poetry it ain't, but who says it had to be other than the aesthetes? Absent any grammars, lexica, or commentaries - all of which would come later as the modern discipline of philology came into its own - this was probably the best possible solution for the times. And besides, if you've been reading along with me the past week, you should know full well that you can't translate a poem without ruining it anyway...