Ugh, terrible. I'm incredibly out of practice.
Owing to the recent reminder that, hey, I own Harry Potter in Ancient Greek, I decided to take it out and take another look. But, because I am a glutton for punishment, I decided I wasn't going to just sit there and muddle through reading it. No, I was going to sit down and re-translate it.
So... I took my copy of the book, and the lexicon and commentary on Andrew Wilson's website, and soon enough the Perseus magic parser (and dictionary), and I translated Harry Potter back in to English.
By which I mean... the first page.
Because that one page took me... an hour and a half.
Ugh.
To be clear: I wasn't trying to magically re-create Rowling's prose out of the Greek. I was trying to treat it like it was a legitimate ancient text, and so to more-or-less accurately convey what the Greek is actually saying.
Thus did this...
Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.
...a fine example of Rowling-original prose, become, in my translation of Andrew Wilson's translation, this:
Master Doursleios made borers and augers of all sorts in a workshop called Grouningos. And great was his form, and supremely rotund; being stout, his neck was not easy to see, but you could see his mustache, as it was very thick. His wife, being not round at all, was blonde and long-necked; she had a double neck by nature and to great benefit, looking over the wall at her neighbors, watching them like a crane. And the Doursleioi had a son, still a boy, by the name of Doudlion; they considered him the finest of all men.
Passable, I guess? Certainly I'm not guaranteeing perfection.
Nothing to it but to keep going, I guess, because if there's one thing I learned, it's that my translation skills are really rusty.