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> you're still engaging with a communal tradition of fellow readers

Inasmuch as you’re reading translations upon translations, sure. But none of that is necessary.

(One could credibly argue that engaging with an LLM is engaging with, in a sense, its training corpus.)

> If you read the Odyssey and decide it was actually about Pokemon, you're misreading it

If you can stand by your reading based on the text, I say go for it. It doesn’t work in your example. But there are plenty of cases where what was once an against-the-grain interpretation dived into and out of the mainstream.

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> Inasmuch as you’re reading translations upon translations, sure. But none of that is necessary.

No, even if you read in the original language. Languages are living, communal things.

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> Languages are living, communal things

Dead languages [1] absolutely exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language

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