odyssey 5.395

Homer, Odyssey 5.394–99

ὡς δ' ὅτ' ἂν ἀσπάσιος βίοτος παίδεσσι φανήῃ
πατρός, ὃς ἐν νούσῳ κεῖται κρατέρ' ἄλγεα πάσχων,
δηρὸν τηκόμενος, στυγερὸς δέ οἱ ἔχραε δαίμων,
ἀσπάσιον δ' ἄρα τόν γε θεοὶ κακότητος ἔλυσαν,
ὣς Ὀδυσῆ' ἀσπαστὸν ἐείσατο γαῖα καὶ ὕλη,
νῆχε δ' ἐπειγόμενος ποσὶν ἠπείρου ἐπιβῆναι.

And like children welcome the life of their father
who lies in illness suffering enormous pain,
wasting away for too long, assailed by some evil spirit,
and then the gods free him from evil—
so did the earth and the woods seem welcome to Odysseus,
and he swam, longing to set foot on dry land.

Well, this one isn't getting high marks for weirdness. I tried, but I couldn't figure out anywhere to go from here. What I really wanted was to replace "welcome" (ἀσπάσιος, which appears thrice in this short passage and which is the axis on which its meaning spins) but none of the workarounds I tried produced satisfactory results. The craziest thing I did was to swap things around so that the children were the subject of the first clause, rather than the father's life, which made for a less tortured word order, but which is also identical to the mistake your average first year would make reading the passage (i.e. confusing subject and direct object where convenient) so it's hard to be too proud of it.