A note on translations, and an idea...

After the previous post:

That's not to say that I don't think it would be great fun to compare, say, three or four verse (and prose, assuming it was sparing) translations of the Descent segment, to see where different authors diverged.

And speaking of which, 'divergence' & 'descent' can mean different things, depending on what you're studying:

What might be an interesting thought (only because I studied too much comparative phylogeny in Genetics): to compare actual texts in a kind of evolutionary tree, with the "is descended from" lines instead mean "was influenced by"...
- For the first implmentation, you'd have to rely on actual evidence - to know that author X owned and had read book Y, etc...
[Admittedly, it doesn't require close reading, just knowledge about author's resources and source texts. I could be quite useful as a visual tool, a kind of "six degrees of separation" for authors.

I suppose you could do this with word choice in translations as well, but that would require a lot more assumptions about what individuals (long dead) were thinking, or what the words meant to them... Too many assumptions should be avoided.

I think that if I did this, I'd use the "Descent" segment of the Odyssey, just so I could use a snappy title using both the words 'divergence' and 'descent'. I'm sure there must be a culture somewhere in the world that thinks puns are the highest form of wit. Perhaps I've just written for too many Capping Shows, though.