OK, that may be a bit harsh. But the danger is that a translation that is out-of-date or badly done will turn you off the book. Many classic books whose translations are now beyond copyright are available for free. But these translations are, generally speaking, poor. To really appreciate these books, find a translation that is up-to-date and that suits your reading style.
The modern style of translations-as-rewrites that aim to meet readers in their comfort zones are terrible, the literary equivalent of shitty dub tracks on foreign video media.
"This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without being grammatically incomprehensible."
Butler is emphatically not this, though - It's a prose adaptation of a poem, and thus in many ways quite far from a "transliteration" compared to e.g. Fagles, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, etc.
I'd argue that Butler's translations are absolutely "translation(s) aiming to meet readers in their comfort zones," by his own admission.
From the preface to Butler's Iliad:
> It follows that a translation should depart hardly at all from the modes of speech current in the translator's own times, inasmuch as nothing is readable, for long, which affects any other diction than that of the age in which it is written.
And later
> I very readily admit that Dr. Leaf has in the main kept more closely to the words of Homer, but I believe him to have lost more of the spirit of the original through his abandonment (no doubt deliberate) of all attempt at stately, and at the same time easy, musical, flow of language, than he has gained in adherence to the letter — to which, after all, neither he nor any man can adhere.
(Oddly, unlike the Odyssey, the PG text of the Iliad does not have Butler's preface. I had to track it down elsewhere. Source: https://ia600209.us.archive.org/10/items/cu31924026468417/cu...)