Tangentially, I'd like to just plug the translations Robert Fitzgerald made of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 1960s and 70s. Your experience of these books will very much come down to the translation you choose. In America at least, his are not the most commonly found in the classics section of a bookstore. I'm told he plays a bit loose with Homer's word choice (I don't read Ancient Greek), but personally I don't mind. Pasternak, when reproached for his loose translation Shakespeare, responded: "Who cares? We're both geniuses."