I'm close to the end of Peter Green's translation of the Iliad, and though hard to plough through at times, the style was not as drab and "old" as I would have expected; the difficulty was mostly due to scenes often being kind of long, essentially bullet point lists and/or with strange content -- i.e. content more than form.
I'd be interested to know what people have to say about that translation, and the one of the Odyssey by Green too.