War music An account of Homer's Iliad

ON MOUNT OLYMPUS the gods are at it again. Bickering, back-stabbing. Thetis implores Zeus, on behalf of her son, the Greek hero Achilles. Hera, the wife and sister of Zeus (you know how families can be), demands that he back her favorites. Far below, on the plains stretching from Troy to the sea, mere mortals fight and suffer in a war that has gone on far too long and will be sung forever. But for now, all-powerful Zeus has had enough. And he lets Hera and the others know it with a threat that shuts them up and silences the world. Then, we read: It was so quiet in Heaven that you could hear The north wind pluck a chicken in Australia. Wait. What? A chicken plucked by the north wind? In Australia? In the "Iliad"? Put the book down, as I did years ago when I first read those lines, laugh out loud, stop, look into the distance, and just imagine - here in your home, there on the battlefield, high in wherever you believe Heaven to be - that kind of silence. Do people everywhere keep lists in their heads of secret societies they belong to, or would belong to if these societies actually existed? Mine include (1) onetime students of classics who somehow - there it is! - hold on to and use their experience in very different fields; and (2) the followers of Christopher Logue's decades-long project to "translate," create an "account" of, "rewrite," honor and mess with Homer's "Iliad." Members of this latter society - and I've met many over the years - know the tale: Logue, a poet, was asked in 1959 by Donald Carne-Ross, a classicist working as a BBC radio producer, to translate a section of the "Iliad" for a radio performance. When Logue pointed out one small problem, that he knew no Greek (the story is told in his memoir, "Prince Charming"), Carne-Ross proposed this: "Read translations by those who did. Follow the story. A translator must know one language well. Preferably his own." Anyone who has studied languages, modern or ancient, will recognize that this is not the standard approach. Carne-Ross was clearly after something - what? Different? More? Other? In Logue he, and then we, got it. Five volumes followed as Logue tackled sections of the "Iliad" out of order: "War Music" (1981), "Kings" (1991), "The Husbands" (1995), "All Day Permanent Red" (2003) - the title taken from a lipstick ad, the volume describing the blood flowing in the "Iliad's" first battle scenes - and "Cold Calls" (2005). They are brought together here for the first time, still just a small portion of the epic poem, but now in traditional story order, under the title "War Music: An Account of Homer's 'Iliad.'" Logue died in 2011, the project sadly incomplete. An appendix - called "Big Men Falling a Long Way," which the editor Christopher Reid tells us was Logue's "own, witty definition of tragedy" - offers intriguing clues to Logue's methods and plans to fill in the poem. What does Logue do with Homer? He cuts, often drastically - concision is key here - but also at times adds a character or scene. He speeds up the action but then, employing modern typography, brings it to a crawl, even a stop. Logue's is a contemporary poetry set atop the always recognizable ancient story - fragmentary, jarring, allusive, "Cubist" (to use another of Logue's anachronisms). Here is one extended example, a battle scene that begins with a command - to us: Drop into it. Noise so clamorous it sucks. You rush your pressed-flow er hackles out To the perimeter. And here it comes: That unpremeditated joy as you - The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip Happy in danger in a dangerous place Yourself another self you found at Troy - Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum! Oh wonderful, most wonderful, and then again more wonderful A bond no word or lack of words can break, Love above love! And here they come again the noble Greeks, Ido, a spear in one a banner in his other hand Your life at every instant up for - Gone. And, candidly, who gives a toss? Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips. Beauty ("pressed-flower") and ugliness ("Greekoid scum"). Ancient ("a spear") and new ("the Uzi shuddering"). Mind games ("yourself another self") and heavy metal ("squeeze nickel"). Above all the joy and horror, the thrill and the waste ("who gives a toss?") of war. It's all here - and so are we. Homer's famous similes asked his listeners and readers to imagine something from their own lives in order to more fully see or understand the action in and around Troy. Logue follows his lead and extends the imagery, the entire story, into our own time, almost cinematically. He is a director, shifting our point of view, aiming or making us aim the camera: "Reverse the shot. / Go close," he writes at one point. At another he conjures a photojournalist who describes the scene of horror he has just witnessed and tells us, "My picture went around the world." And we, raised on the movies, seeing war play out on the nightly news (my own professional home), know exactly what Logue means. On and on: Logue plays with the traditional epithets, the descriptive attachments to characters. Here, Odysseus is "small but big" and Aphrodite (why resist?) "Miss Tops and Thongs." Logue summons future battles (Okinawa, Stalingrad) as though Hector, like us, would know of them. And he sets this greatest of all epic poems in the larger history of literature, by referring to works that would become "classics" in their own right, in dramatic moments as warriors face death ("King Richard calling for another horse") and near slapstick, as when soldiers in one army mock their enemies: "Here come the Sisters Karamazov." Homer/not Homer. But is all this, you know, allowed? Many years ago my wife and I met studying ancient Greek. We would struggle to translate from our Oxford editions, word by word, pushing ourselves on line by line. (In the right setting, with the right partner, this is actually far more romantic than it might sound, especially when you add wine - hell, the Greeks did.) When we got to the "Iliad," we used the translation by the scholar Richmond Lattimore to check our own work and help us make our way. Lattimore was considered the most textually accurate of modern translators, perhaps to a fault. No one questioned his Greek; some have disparaged his English. At the time, though, we striving neophytes thought, May the gods bless the good professor. With Logue, we would have flunked. In a Paris Review interview in 1993, Logue did not have good things to say about Lattimore and other "professors" who had taken up Homer. "They are the translation police," he said. "It is easy to see why: It keeps Homer in their hands." Perhaps the Uzi was excessively warm against Logue's hip that day, for this is far too harsh. He had his own "professor," after all, in CarneRoss, who provided word-for-word translation, a "crib," as needed. As for the rest of us, we who lack the language - and I lost my ability to read Greek at Homeric level long ago - we rely on the professors. We choose our favorites and set aside others. Mine was Robert Fitzgerald. Many years later, I still grasp Zeus by the knees and ask that he bless the translators. And Christopher Logue, among them, bless him highly, Zeus. We can judge a translation or an "account" (the word Logue preferred) by its own intent and then by its impact on us as readers. How does poetry move from one language to another? Count the ways: Through the precise meaning of the words, the truth of the story. Through the sound or music of the language. What about other, mistier qualities - a poem's "feel," the "strangeness" it once had for its readers in the original? In his introduction to the popular "Iliad" translation by Robert Fagles, the classicist Bernard Knox writes that the language of Homer was "brimful of archaisms - of vocabulary, syntax and grammar - and of incongruities: words and forms drawn from different dialects and different stages of the growth of the language." Homer, that is, was strange from the beginning, wonderfully, heroically strange. And Logue, in turn, is wonderfully, Homerically strange. Somehow, in an age when the humanities are said to be fighting for their lives (let us wage that battle), Homer continues to be read. He certainly continues to be translated: I have five versions of the "Iliad" spread before me on my desk - just a sampling. He also continues to be wrestled with by our own contemporary poets, as in Alice Oswald's remarkable "Memorial," in which she fills in the story of every death in the "Iliad." Why this continued engagement? Perhaps because the idea of endless war is as fresh as this morning's headline, the latest tweet. Perhaps because some things are just worth holding on to, and seeing again, in our own light. In "War Music," Christopher Logue has worked from what is still the greatest story of war ever told and created a vivid and fresh poem in a language he knew very well, indeed. My advice: "Drop into it," friends.

Poet, actor, and playwright Logue's passing in 2011, age 85, prevented the completion of Big Men Falling a Long Way, the sixth part of his poetic reimagining of Homer's Iliad. Poet Reid (A Scattering) has edited the extent notes and manuscripts, arranging them with the published installments War Music (1981), Kings (1991), The Husbands (1995), All -Permanent Red (2003), and Cold Calls (2005) to produce this collective volume. Logue's irreverent, idiosyncratic, and distinctive take on the Iliad, much in the form and spirit of Ezra Pound's "make it new" approach, is neither translation nor imitation. The free verse plays on the narrative gaps in Homer to deliver a dynamic and provocative parallel epic, capturing the temptations and the horror of war, relating as much the anxiety of Achilles as the warrior's rage. Like Alice -Oswald's elegiac Memorial, Logue illuminates the complex human dimensions implicit in Homer's verse. VERDICT While necessarily incomplete, this work is highly recommended for the insight it brings to the Iliad and also as a powerful and original work in its own right.-Thomas L. Cooksey, -formerly with Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.