Andrew Wilson has translated harry potter into ancient greek, the longest work to receive that treatment since 400 CE. wilson was very intent to recreate a version of the book which would make sense to a Greek from any era up to the 4th century AD who had managed by some magical process to reach the 21st century.
this led to some thorny problems:

Cultural problems There were many, one of the more obvious being
relationships – the patriarchal Greeks not really concerning themselves with relationships like mother’s sister
Time was another one – Greeks had little interest in “telling the time” although they did have devices for measuring how much had elapsed (water clocks for timing speeches, for example). Nor did they care about minutes, let alone seconds!
And colors – it’s little appreciated how languages divide up the visible spectrum of light in their own way – our red orange yellow etc is of course completely arbitrary- the spectrum is a continuum.

reminds me of douglas hofstadters Le Ton Beau De Marot.

A skilled literary translator makes a far larger number of changes, and far more significant changes, than any virtuoso performer of classical music would ever dare to make in playing notes in the score of, say, a Beethoven piano sonata. In literary translation, it’s totally humdrum stuff for new ideas to be interpreted, old ideas to be deleted, structures to be inverted, twisted around, and on and on.

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