Christopher Logue (1926–2011)

There's a fair bit of chaff in this retrospective, but when Logue's on song he's a match for any English poet of the second half of the 20th century. Stuff like "When I was serving my country" and "Caption for a Photograph of Four Organized Criminals" blends the personal and political as deftly as his contemporaries Gavin Ewart (of whom Logue reminds me) and Peter Reading, and his later work — "Fragment" and "New Numbers" especially — reads like an updating of Eliot with its easy but show more insistent iambs and many-angled narrative voice. There's a very funny invective against a neighbour who mutilates Logue's tree. There's an extract from his monumental "War Music" included too, but you should read that in its entirety. I loved this one (could you call it an ecLogue?):

Things

The sun shines on the fields and on the town.
Far in the distance by the mill
A man in blue is gardening.
A cat sleeps on a window-sill.
At a bar, two gentlemen discuss the latest Aston-Martin.

A boy and girl by a railway bridge.
The girl holds up her face. Is kissed.
The train that passes by contains
A general and a scientist
Delighting in each other's brains.

In a quiet place a woman of fifty dressed in black,
With a newspaper across her face,
Dreams that she is young and slim.
The front page of the paper says:
I MARRIED A SEXUAL MANIAC
And the back page says:
SKIRTS WILL BE SHORTER IN THE SPRING.

The lovers go their separate ways.
She feels he only wants one thing.
He feels he's misunderstood.
The man who has been gardening
Cleans his spade with a bit of wood.
And the sun goes down on the fields and on the town. show less

How do I show what a beautiful, troubling read this is? Christopher Logue put colours and light between the lines, constantly this made me want to stop and gaze out the window to hold the imagery that was playing in my mind. It’s troubling because at times there is violence and cruelty that highlights how awful war is.

This is an unfinished work but I didn’t mind, the moving action was like sequence of beads where one bead could exist on its own. What cemented this together were the show more descriptions that came alive as if I was looking at a painting. The drama lacked this but was interesting in a different way; little extras were added to Homer’s heroes and I liked how this was intertwined with places and objects that exist in my time than in Homer’s.

In fact, there’s so much here that all I want to do is read it again. show less

It turns out that there is, perhaps, such a thing as translation. Logue's control of English verse and deep understanding of Homeric structures, that is, how theme is expressed through form (repeating epithets, but not using the Greek epithets themselves; repeated scenes but not stock hexameters; theophanies that bring the Olympians to life; gore) produces a compelling "account", as he calls it, of parts of Homer's epic. He is ruthless like the blind bard, his iambs are almost silky, he show more lights up thousand-years-gone traditions with an incandescence that modern readers can see by.

I've long loved Richard Lattimore's translation (yes, yes Fagles and Hughes, too) but they seem to be more trans-scribers of the words, more like taking a picture of the text that ends up being developed in English. Logue, though, Logue finds the heart of Homer and shoves it into your chest. Truly an accomplishment. Onward to All Day Permanent Red and Cold Calls.

Plenty of people have quoted passages from the work, so I'll refrain. You must rush out to get your hands on a copy. Go! show less

The cover calls it a "reimagining" of The Iliad as opposed to a straight retranslation; thus all the non-Greek names, extreme recharacterizations, and anachronistic references to Napoleon and nuclear weapons, etc. It can also be seen as more of an Ezra Pound-style Modernist poem that happens to be composed of material from The Iliad, but either way it's brilliant, one of the most enjoyable Iliad-derived works I've read in a long time. Forget that Logue didn't fully complete it before he show more died, or that it uses the full Modernist arsenal of poetic tricks instead of a more traditional Homeric style, or that Logue didn't even read Greek and had to rely on secondary works and his own poetic license: this is the freshest look at the Iliad you're likely to read, and you wish that he had been able to finish the whole thing up.

Every once in a while, someone gets the idea to retranslate a classic like The Iliad. Sometimes this gets done for accuracy reasons, as our modern knowledge of the ancient language, culture, or setting improves; sometimes it's done merely to keep the language fresh and readable for a contemporary audience; sometimes it's because some hubristic mortal actually believes they've found something new in one of the most studied works on the planet. While I'm sure there are many reasons beyond simple cultural inertia for why The Iliad is still so popular, one reason is that it offers a seemingly inexhaustible mine of great characters, with such strong identities that they've become archetypes. Achilles, the world's mightiest warrior! Helen, the world's most beautiful woman! Odysseus, the world's greatest liar! The lasting popularity of such superlative individuals is no mystery, and I think there's a good paper to be written about how modern superhero comics culture relates back to the enduring affection for Greek mythology. Didn't the Victorians appreciate a good Achilles reference the way we appreciate the equivalent for Batman, the world's greatest detective?

Logue even delivers the action in this breathless, pulpy, comic book-ish way. Hector and Achilles slaughter their enemies like video game characters, with close-up cutscenes whenever someone important like Patroclus or Sarpedon gets killed. It's not enough for them to simply die, they get long, loving, blood-soaked passages, reveling in both the cruelty of war, and the extent to which mortals are merely playthings for divine family squabbles. The gods are for the most part petty and puerile, their interactions with Zeus often conveyed as the pleas of small children to an occasionally indulgent father, and their epithets are amazing: Achilles is Wondersulk, Aphrodite is the Lady of Tops and Thongs, Apollo the God of Mice. The central theme of the Iliad - the impotence of men's plans beneath the whims of the gods - is only enhanced by the portrayal of their caprice, as well as in the quick cuts Logue makes between the different characters and even through time, analepsis and prolepsis jammed in right after each other, rearranging and reinterpreting the original material. It really does feel like a modern revision of the story.

And the language Logue uses that does even more to heighten that impression. The translation I've spent the most time with is Robert Fagels' Penguin Classics one. It's great, but it's very "traditional" - in other words it tries to strike a balance between the meaning of the original Greek and its rhythm. It's perfectly pleasant on its own, but compare it to a passage from War Music, right before battle is truly joined:

"Think of those fields of light that sometimes sheet
Low tide sands, and of the panes of such a tide
When, carrying the sky, they start to flow
Everywhere, and then across themselves.
Likewise the Greek bronze streaming out at speed,
Glinting among the orchards and the groves,
And then across the plain - dust, grass, no grass,
Its long low swells and falls - all warwear pearl,
Blue Heaven above,
Mt Ida's snow behind, Troy in between.
And what pleasure it was to be there!
To be one of that host!
Greek, and as naked as God! naked as bride and groom!
Exulting for battle!"

Or a conversation between Zeus and Poseidon:

"'Brother,' God said, 'your altars smoke on every coast
To catch your voice, grave saints in oilskins lean across the waves.
Try not to let the humans bother you -
My full associate is destiny. Between ourselves'
(Leading him out onto the sand) 'I may wind up this war.
And then, Pope of the Oceans, with Greece rowing home
You will have sacrifices up to here... and as they heave
Your train of overhanging crests can sink them pitilessly.
But later - when I give the nod.'"

Or after the death of Sarpedon:

"And God turned to Apollo, saying:
'Mousegod, take My Sarpedon out of range
And clarify his wounds with mountain water.
Moisten his body with tinctures of white myrrh
And violet iodine; and when these chrisms are dry
Fold him in miniver that never wears
And lints that never fade,
And call My two blind footmen, Sleep and Death,
To carry him to Lycia by Taurus,
Where, playing stone chimes and tambourines,
The Lycians will consecrate his death,
Before whose memory the stones shall fade.'"

I could go on. It's a shame that what could potentially have been the most intriguing section, "Big Men Falling a Long Way", about the battle between Achilles and Hector, is unfinished. However, what Logue has actually done is extraordinary. As a "reimagining", I would rank it up with there with Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of The Odyssey. It made me appreciate the beauty of the original Iliad even more than I already did. show less