Engine Summer

The only way I could see such a thing being unethical is if you presented the entire thing as your own ideas, or the words as being entirely Hodgson's. I agree with others that I would call it an adaptation rather than a translation, but that is a perfectly good thing to do. The entire point of having good stories is that they can be retold, and sometimes the retellings are better, and sometimes they're just different. (And sometimes they're worse, too, but even then there's nothing wrong with creating the new version.) Stories have always been retold, we've just reached a point now where it's very easy to keep track of the original words and attributions. That doesn't mean we should stop retelling, just that now the original versions can stick around along with the new ones. And one of the main points of copyright expiring (as it used to do) is to allow people to do new things with old works.