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War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad
A remarkable hybrid of translation, adaptation, and invention
Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.
“Your life at every instant up for― / Gone. / And, candidly, who gives a toss? / Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips,” writes Christopher Logue in his original version of Homer’s Iliad , the uncanny “translation of translations” that won ecstatic and unparalleled acclaim as “the best translation of Homer since Pope’s” ( The New York Review of Books ).
Logue’s account of Homer’s Iliad is a radical reimagining and reconfiguration of Homer’s tale of warfare, human folly, and the power of the gods in language and verse that is emphatically modern and “possessed of a very terrible beauty” ( Slate ). Illness prevented him from bringing his version of the Iliad to completion, but enough survives in notebooks and letters to assemble a compilation that includes the previously published volumes War Music , Kings , The Husbands , All Day Permanent Red , and Cold Calls , along with previously unpublished material, in one final illuminating volume arranged by his friend and fellow poet Christopher Reid. The result, War Music , comes as near as possible to representing the poet’s complete vision and confirms what his admirers have long known: that “ Logue’s Homer is likely to endure as one of the great long poems of the twentieth century” ( The Times Literary Supplement ).
Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.
“Your life at every instant up for― / Gone. / And, candidly, who gives a toss? / Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips,” writes Christopher Logue in his original version of Homer’s Iliad , the uncanny “translation of translations” that won ecstatic and unparalleled acclaim as “the best translation of Homer since Pope’s” ( The New York Review of Books ).
Logue’s account of Homer’s Iliad is a radical reimagining and reconfiguration of Homer’s tale of warfare, human folly, and the power of the gods in language and verse that is emphatically modern and “possessed of a very terrible beauty” ( Slate ). Illness prevented him from bringing his version of the Iliad to completion, but enough survives in notebooks and letters to assemble a compilation that includes the previously published volumes War Music , Kings , The Husbands , All Day Permanent Red , and Cold Calls , along with previously unpublished material, in one final illuminating volume arranged by his friend and fellow poet Christopher Reid. The result, War Music , comes as near as possible to representing the poet’s complete vision and confirms what his admirers have long known: that “ Logue’s Homer is likely to endure as one of the great long poems of the twentieth century” ( The Times Literary Supplement ).
352 pages, Hardcover
First published November 19, 2015
66 people are currently reading
2399 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Logue
75 books38 followersChristopher Logue, CBE was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival. He also wrote for the theatre and cinema as well as acting in a number of films. His two screenplays are Savage Messiah and The End of Arthur's Marriage. He was also a long-term contributor to Private Eye magazine, as well as writing for the Merlin literary journal of Alexander Trocchi. He won the 2005 Whitbread Poetry Award for Cold Calls.
His early popularity was marked by the release of a loose adaptation of Pablo Neruda's "Twenty Love Poems", later released as an extended play recording, "Red Bird: Jazz and Poetry", backed by a Jazz group led by Tony Kinsey.
One of his poems, "Be Not Too Hard" was set to music by Donovan Leach, and made popular by Joan Baez, from her 1967 album "Joan". Donovan's version appeared in the film "Poor Cow"(1967).
His major poetical work was an ongoing project to render Homer's Iliad into a modernist idiom. This work is published in a number of small books, usually equating to two or three books of the original text. (The volume entitled Homer: War Music was shortlisted for the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize.) He also published an autobiography called Prince Charming (1999).
His lines tend to be short, pithy and frequently political, as in Song of Autobiography:
"I, Christopher Logue, was baptized the year
Many thousands of Englishmen
Fists clenched, their bellies empty,
Walked day and night on the capital city."
He wrote the couplet that is sung at the beginning and end of the 1965 film A High Wind in Jamaica, the screenplay for Savage Messiah (1972), a television version of Antigone (1962), and a short play for the TV series The Wednesday Play titled The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965).
He also appeared in a number of films as an actor, most notably as Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils and as the spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam's 1977 film Jabberwocky.
Logue wrote for the Olympia Press under the pseudonym, Count Palmiro Vicarion, including a pornographic novel, Lust.
________________________________________
source: wikipedia.org
His early popularity was marked by the release of a loose adaptation of Pablo Neruda's "Twenty Love Poems", later released as an extended play recording, "Red Bird: Jazz and Poetry", backed by a Jazz group led by Tony Kinsey.
One of his poems, "Be Not Too Hard" was set to music by Donovan Leach, and made popular by Joan Baez, from her 1967 album "Joan". Donovan's version appeared in the film "Poor Cow"(1967).
His major poetical work was an ongoing project to render Homer's Iliad into a modernist idiom. This work is published in a number of small books, usually equating to two or three books of the original text. (The volume entitled Homer: War Music was shortlisted for the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize.) He also published an autobiography called Prince Charming (1999).
His lines tend to be short, pithy and frequently political, as in Song of Autobiography:
"I, Christopher Logue, was baptized the year
Many thousands of Englishmen
Fists clenched, their bellies empty,
Walked day and night on the capital city."
He wrote the couplet that is sung at the beginning and end of the 1965 film A High Wind in Jamaica, the screenplay for Savage Messiah (1972), a television version of Antigone (1962), and a short play for the TV series The Wednesday Play titled The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965).
He also appeared in a number of films as an actor, most notably as Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils and as the spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam's 1977 film Jabberwocky.
Logue wrote for the Olympia Press under the pseudonym, Count Palmiro Vicarion, including a pornographic novel, Lust.
________________________________________
source: wikipedia.org
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 84 reviews
October 18, 2025
The writing is fast paced, knife-edge precision and perfection, thrilling in its accounts of hacking, screeching hand-to-hand combat, exquisite in its fixing of the heroes of the Trojan War, the landscapes they maul over and the skies they die beneath.
Very heaven is to hear it read in a BBC recording by the greatest Shakespearean of my generation, Alan Howard. The spine tingles from the very first and never lets up
Christopher Logue’s War Music is a narrative poem itself, not a translation but a reworking of some of the first books of Homer’s Iliad.
I love it.
Very heaven is to hear it read in a BBC recording by the greatest Shakespearean of my generation, Alan Howard. The spine tingles from the very first and never lets up
Christopher Logue’s War Music is a narrative poem itself, not a translation but a reworking of some of the first books of Homer’s Iliad.
I love it.
January 30, 2019
I've thought this same thought about many books in 2016--what a great reading year!--but War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad is one of the great works I've read over the last 12 months, really magnificent and magical, not a translation of Homer on any level and yet not quite an adaptation either because it feels like it gets to the visceral center of what Homer is about. The scenes are not analogous to a translation--for example instead of beginning with the famous line invoking the muse to sing of Achilles's rage, it opens instead this way:
Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal fleet.
And on and on, a completely different poem about the same conflicts and characters--to borrow a word from these first lines, "aslant" with new perspectives and new meanings. The power of the poetry is heart-striking on every page and in this way it rises above translation in its expressiveness in English. Remarkable in so many ways. I do think it requires a strong familiarity with the original poem to access, though, because it's in the interstitial differences from the original that a lot of its meanings germinate.
Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal fleet.
And on and on, a completely different poem about the same conflicts and characters--to borrow a word from these first lines, "aslant" with new perspectives and new meanings. The power of the poetry is heart-striking on every page and in this way it rises above translation in its expressiveness in English. Remarkable in so many ways. I do think it requires a strong familiarity with the original poem to access, though, because it's in the interstitial differences from the original that a lot of its meanings germinate.
December 12, 2017
Christopher Logue’s War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad is more of a re-imagining than a re-telling. Logue writes a version of the Iliad with many of the same characters and conflicts. But he uses the original poem as a skeleton which he fleshes out by stamping his unique mark on it. He deviates from the original; injects personal commentary; inserts references to post-Homeric historical events, including World War II; and endows his characters with a surprisingly modern diction and attitude.
Logue tells his story through some dazzling lines of poetry. He is liberal in his use of fragments, exclamations, repetitions, commands, rhetorical questions, and lines that sizzle and dance. Combat scenes are particularly effective in capturing the intensity of the battle with lines that clip at a rapid pace. He engages his reader by directly addressing him/her as “you” and ordering “you” to shout, to go left, etc. etc. At one point, he tells us of the “Uzi shuddering warm against your hip.” His use of present tense heightens the sense of immediacy and immerses the reader in the events of the poem.
Logue peppers his lines with humor and interesting word choice. A female is “a she”. Athena reminding Zeus about the Trojans’ violation of their oath is described with the following words:
Picking a cotton from his sleeve, “Pa-pa,’ Athena said:
This is not fairyland. The Trojans swore an oath
To which You put Your voice.’
‘I did not.’
‘Father, You did. All Heaven heard You. Ask the Sea.’
‘I definitely did not.’
‘Did-did-did-did—and no returns.’
Aphrodite appears dressed in grey silk pajamas with gold piping and “snakeskin flip-flops.” She is referred to later as “The God of Tops and Thongs.” In particularly colorful language, she (Love) reminds Zeus and us why Hera hates the Trojans:
‘Stuff Greece,’ Love said.
‘Your blubber-bummed wife with her gobstopper nipples
Cannot stand Troy because Troy’s Paris put her last
When we stripped off for him.’
Although Christopher Logue did not live long enough to complete this work, what he left us with is a stunning feat of the imagination wrapped in a poem that delights and amazes. The story is Homer’s, but the telling of it is Logue’s. And what a brilliant telling it is!
Very highly recommended.
Logue tells his story through some dazzling lines of poetry. He is liberal in his use of fragments, exclamations, repetitions, commands, rhetorical questions, and lines that sizzle and dance. Combat scenes are particularly effective in capturing the intensity of the battle with lines that clip at a rapid pace. He engages his reader by directly addressing him/her as “you” and ordering “you” to shout, to go left, etc. etc. At one point, he tells us of the “Uzi shuddering warm against your hip.” His use of present tense heightens the sense of immediacy and immerses the reader in the events of the poem.
Logue peppers his lines with humor and interesting word choice. A female is “a she”. Athena reminding Zeus about the Trojans’ violation of their oath is described with the following words:
Picking a cotton from his sleeve, “Pa-pa,’ Athena said:
This is not fairyland. The Trojans swore an oath
To which You put Your voice.’
‘I did not.’
‘Father, You did. All Heaven heard You. Ask the Sea.’
‘I definitely did not.’
‘Did-did-did-did—and no returns.’
Aphrodite appears dressed in grey silk pajamas with gold piping and “snakeskin flip-flops.” She is referred to later as “The God of Tops and Thongs.” In particularly colorful language, she (Love) reminds Zeus and us why Hera hates the Trojans:
‘Stuff Greece,’ Love said.
‘Your blubber-bummed wife with her gobstopper nipples
Cannot stand Troy because Troy’s Paris put her last
When we stripped off for him.’
Although Christopher Logue did not live long enough to complete this work, what he left us with is a stunning feat of the imagination wrapped in a poem that delights and amazes. The story is Homer’s, but the telling of it is Logue’s. And what a brilliant telling it is!
Very highly recommended.
May 12, 2016
Rather surprisingly, not over-rated, and easily the best book of poetry I've read for some time. I find myself with very little to say, except that it's a wonderful lesson in how to combine the elliptical and the complex with psychology and plot.
January 12, 2022
What an amazing, stunning, beautiful, mesmerizing, spellbinding, thrilling, epic poem. The subtitle says War Music is "An Account" of Homer's Iliad. I don't know exactly what an account is but might as well use it because certainly none of the other words one might use make sense. It follows the story and trajectory of the Iliad but is not a "translation" with a direct mapping of lines or groups of lines. A "retelling" would belittle something that really does a lot more than just tell the story. It is certainly not a "modernization" even though the language is deliberately modern and anachronistic in some places.
I read this on and off slowly over nearly four weeks, probably longer than I've spent on the Iliad itself. But it was really worth a slow and careful reading--even if it was all so fluent that it never felt difficult.
Christopher Logue wrote this and published parts on and off over the course of his life. Sadly he did not finish it, it includes and "account" of Books 1 through 9 and then of Books 16-19 (Patroclus entering the action, getting killed, and Achilles mourning his death and vowing vengeance). I would love nothing more than to have Logue's "account" of the rest of the Iliad, especially the death of Hector and the ransoming of his body. Sadly, it is not be. But what we do have is extraordinary.
I read this on and off slowly over nearly four weeks, probably longer than I've spent on the Iliad itself. But it was really worth a slow and careful reading--even if it was all so fluent that it never felt difficult.
Christopher Logue wrote this and published parts on and off over the course of his life. Sadly he did not finish it, it includes and "account" of Books 1 through 9 and then of Books 16-19 (Patroclus entering the action, getting killed, and Achilles mourning his death and vowing vengeance). I would love nothing more than to have Logue's "account" of the rest of the Iliad, especially the death of Hector and the ransoming of his body. Sadly, it is not be. But what we do have is extraordinary.
October 16, 2024
Fragments of works by Christopher Logue’s of Homer’s The Iliad. His poetry is like a homage to the original. The imagery paints vast scenes of injured pride and bloody (sometimes graphic) violence.
Christopher Logue’s poetical beats of this very old story bring to my mind a quote from another poet, “[a] terrible beauty is born”. In this poem I was transported to scenes of sheer brutality because there has been disrespect, but what a price to pay.
This poem is a stark reminder of how in wars nobody really wins.
Christopher Logue’s poetical beats of this very old story bring to my mind a quote from another poet, “[a] terrible beauty is born”. In this poem I was transported to scenes of sheer brutality because there has been disrespect, but what a price to pay.
This poem is a stark reminder of how in wars nobody really wins.
July 22, 2019
The concept of this book is exactly right. It's not a "translation" of the Iliad. It's an "account." Logue doesn't even speak Greek, he just read a ton of English translations. His aim was producing a work that gives the sense of the Iliad, but more importantly stands on its own as English poetry rather than slavishly attempting to transliterate each line of Homer's Greek. The latter approach almost invariably results in a product that may give some sense of Homer, but is not really recognizable as poetry.
Alexander Pope's treatment of the Iliad in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets is along these lines--a translation that is a true masterpiece of English poetry in its own right. It is amazing.
Logue's attempt to do the same in a modernist style is, for me, much less successful. Modernist poetry just doesn't stand up as well to verse after verse about combat. Logue's style doesn't capture the seriousness of the events or the earnestness of the account. It comes off as a bit ... sardonic and verging on parody. But you're not supposed to be vaguely chuckling at Achilles, and any charm wears off very fast.
Also the cover (bright red with an Apache attack helicopter) is truly awful.
Alexander Pope's treatment of the Iliad in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets is along these lines--a translation that is a true masterpiece of English poetry in its own right. It is amazing.
Logue's attempt to do the same in a modernist style is, for me, much less successful. Modernist poetry just doesn't stand up as well to verse after verse about combat. Logue's style doesn't capture the seriousness of the events or the earnestness of the account. It comes off as a bit ... sardonic and verging on parody. But you're not supposed to be vaguely chuckling at Achilles, and any charm wears off very fast.
Also the cover (bright red with an Apache attack helicopter) is truly awful.
December 28, 2016
This is a single volume collection of the late Christopher Logue's poetic interpretation of Homer's Iliad and it is nothing short of just brilliant! This collection of poetry is well worth reading on an almost annual basis, and I'm saddened to to realize that Logue's poetic voice has been silenced upon his death in late-2011. I will always treasure my collection of his 'Iliad' poetry, including War Music, Cold Calls, and All Day Permanent Red.
March 29, 2020
"And wet its face with tears, and kissed and kissed again,
and said: 'My love, I swear you will not burn
till Hector's severed head is in my lap.'"
Read for my Classics class and I'm so glad it was required. Such a beautiful interpretation of the Iliad. I love Logue's style and his combination of classical prose with a more modern simile. Kinda sad I rented this one from the bookstore because I desperately want my own copy to pour over and annotate.
and said: 'My love, I swear you will not burn
till Hector's severed head is in my lap.'"
Read for my Classics class and I'm so glad it was required. Such a beautiful interpretation of the Iliad. I love Logue's style and his combination of classical prose with a more modern simile. Kinda sad I rented this one from the bookstore because I desperately want my own copy to pour over and annotate.
December 15, 2016
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 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.
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.
May 21, 2024
incredibly sad that this was never finished :(
i feel like this could have been one of the modernist greats
i feel like this could have been one of the modernist greats
September 22, 2024
Frickin epic man!!!
February 26, 2017
This is so heartbreakingly good. This might be the best literary experience I've had in at least a year. I can't read the Patrocleia & GBH (books 16 - 18, or "the part where Patroclus dies and then Achilles has to hear about it") without crying. I remember reading the Iliad for the first time in college (Lombardo) and being engrossed, hearing the clash of spear on shield, feeling the rage coursing down through the centuries. Other translations (Fagles, Fitzgerald, Lattimore) to me felt dead, stiff. The rage, the tragedy, the sheer violence - none of that was recalled to me until reading War Music.
Logue did not attempt a translation here, and I'm glad he didn't (new translations of the Iliad seem to be trending something fierce right now). In fact, Logue did not know a word of Greek. Instead, he sat around and gathered all the different translations around him, and from that heap of broken images, he created something wonderful and glittering in its own right. (Logue has acknowledged his debt to Eliot and Pound.) This is a poetic achievement, and it works precisely because it knocks about your head and rattles loose all the bits of mythic knowledge you've managed to sop up over the years.
Read for the images alone. Buzzing in your brain as you thrum along underground, the lights of the subway flickering, and your mind a thousand thousand years away.
***
Quotes/descriptions/words that fall in just the right order to make my breath go just a little shallow with delight:
"Low ceiling. Sticky air.
Our stillness like the stillness in
Atlantis when the big wave came,
The brim-full basins of abandoned docks,
Or Christmas morning by the sea." (18)
"'Well then, my Lord,
You change the terms, I change the tense.
Let is be was.'" (21)
"You are part dust, part deity." (31)
"Dawn stepped barefooted from her lover's bed." (64)
"We flowed
Back through the ships, and lifted them;
Our dust, our tide; and lifted them; our tide;
Hulls dipping left; now right; our backs, our sea;
Our masts like flickering indicators now;
Knees high; 'Now lift...' knocked props; 'Now lift again...'
And our relief, our sky; our liberty;
As each enjoyed his favorite thoughts; his plans
And to a Trojan watcher we appeared
Like a dinghy club, now moored on mud;
Now upright on bright water; and now gone." (70-71)
(And as you read, your mind bobs up and down the rhythm of the words like a boat cresting waves.)
"To the sigh of the string, see Panda's shot float off;
To the slap of the string on the stave, float on
Over the strip for a beat, a beat; and then
Carry a tunnel the width of a lipstick through Quist's neck." (144)
"Drop into it.
Noise so clamorous it sucks.
You rush your pressed-flower 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." (167)
"Picture a yacht
Canting at speed
Over ripple-ribbed sand.
Change its mast to a man,
Change its boom to a bow,
Change its sail to a shield:
Notice Merionez
Breasting the whalebacks to picket the corpse of Patroclus." (253)
"His feet go backwards, treading on the dead / That sigh and ooze like moss" (262)
Logue did not attempt a translation here, and I'm glad he didn't (new translations of the Iliad seem to be trending something fierce right now). In fact, Logue did not know a word of Greek. Instead, he sat around and gathered all the different translations around him, and from that heap of broken images, he created something wonderful and glittering in its own right. (Logue has acknowledged his debt to Eliot and Pound.) This is a poetic achievement, and it works precisely because it knocks about your head and rattles loose all the bits of mythic knowledge you've managed to sop up over the years.
Read for the images alone. Buzzing in your brain as you thrum along underground, the lights of the subway flickering, and your mind a thousand thousand years away.
***
Quotes/descriptions/words that fall in just the right order to make my breath go just a little shallow with delight:
"Low ceiling. Sticky air.
Our stillness like the stillness in
Atlantis when the big wave came,
The brim-full basins of abandoned docks,
Or Christmas morning by the sea." (18)
"'Well then, my Lord,
You change the terms, I change the tense.
Let is be was.'" (21)
"You are part dust, part deity." (31)
"Dawn stepped barefooted from her lover's bed." (64)
"We flowed
Back through the ships, and lifted them;
Our dust, our tide; and lifted them; our tide;
Hulls dipping left; now right; our backs, our sea;
Our masts like flickering indicators now;
Knees high; 'Now lift...' knocked props; 'Now lift again...'
And our relief, our sky; our liberty;
As each enjoyed his favorite thoughts; his plans
And to a Trojan watcher we appeared
Like a dinghy club, now moored on mud;
Now upright on bright water; and now gone." (70-71)
(And as you read, your mind bobs up and down the rhythm of the words like a boat cresting waves.)
"To the sigh of the string, see Panda's shot float off;
To the slap of the string on the stave, float on
Over the strip for a beat, a beat; and then
Carry a tunnel the width of a lipstick through Quist's neck." (144)
"Drop into it.
Noise so clamorous it sucks.
You rush your pressed-flower 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." (167)
"Picture a yacht
Canting at speed
Over ripple-ribbed sand.
Change its mast to a man,
Change its boom to a bow,
Change its sail to a shield:
Notice Merionez
Breasting the whalebacks to picket the corpse of Patroclus." (253)
"His feet go backwards, treading on the dead / That sigh and ooze like moss" (262)
November 24, 2019
"Who says prayer does no good?*", but Buyer Beware.
Review of the Blackstone Publishing audiobook edition (Nov 2019) of the Faber & Faber hardcover War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad (Nov 2015)
It is great to cheer for an audio edition of Christopher Logue's (23 November 1926 – 2 December 2011) magnum opus modernist version of The Iliad which brings the new poem back to the oral tradition of its inspiration. It is not so great that despite Audible's promo advertising, which states that it includes "previously unpublished material," the audiobook actually does not include the 2015's hardcover's Appendix "Great Men Falling a Long Way" which were the 30 pages of unpublished work that could be reconstructed after Logue's passing. Nor does it include the 4 page Editor's Note that explains the unpublished material. The poem as recorded ends with the final line of Pax, Logue's account of Book 19 of The Iliad:
which is still a good valedictory image of forlorn desolation to end on.
So this audio edition of War Music includes the narrated versions of:
1. Kings: An Account of Books 1 and 2 of Homer's Iliad (2001)
2. The Husbands: An Account of Books III and IV of Homer's Iliad (2001)
3. All Day Permanent Red: An Account of the First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad (2003) (Books 5 and 6 of Homer)
4. Cold Calls: War Music Continued (Books 7 to 9 of Homer) (2005)
5. War Music: An Account of Books 16** to 19 of Homer's Iliad (1981)
and it is missing the fragments which, if completed, would have been the proposed volume 6 Great Men Falling a Long Way which theoretically would have filled in the missing gaps with Logue's versions of Homer's Books 10-15 and Books 20-24.
The performance by veteran narrator Simon Vance was excellent throughout.
* A line from All Day Permanent Red (2004).
** The 1981 edition collects earlier published smaller volumes such as Patrocleia of Homer (1963), GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm) and Pax.
Review of the Blackstone Publishing audiobook edition (Nov 2019) of the Faber & Faber hardcover War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad (Nov 2015)
It is great to cheer for an audio edition of Christopher Logue's (23 November 1926 – 2 December 2011) magnum opus modernist version of The Iliad which brings the new poem back to the oral tradition of its inspiration. It is not so great that despite Audible's promo advertising, which states that it includes "previously unpublished material," the audiobook actually does not include the 2015's hardcover's Appendix "Great Men Falling a Long Way" which were the 30 pages of unpublished work that could be reconstructed after Logue's passing. Nor does it include the 4 page Editor's Note that explains the unpublished material. The poem as recorded ends with the final line of Pax, Logue's account of Book 19 of The Iliad:
Someone has left a spear stuck in the sand.
which is still a good valedictory image of forlorn desolation to end on.
So this audio edition of War Music includes the narrated versions of:
1. Kings: An Account of Books 1 and 2 of Homer's Iliad (2001)
2. The Husbands: An Account of Books III and IV of Homer's Iliad (2001)
3. All Day Permanent Red: An Account of the First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad (2003) (Books 5 and 6 of Homer)
4. Cold Calls: War Music Continued (Books 7 to 9 of Homer) (2005)
5. War Music: An Account of Books 16** to 19 of Homer's Iliad (1981)
and it is missing the fragments which, if completed, would have been the proposed volume 6 Great Men Falling a Long Way which theoretically would have filled in the missing gaps with Logue's versions of Homer's Books 10-15 and Books 20-24.
The performance by veteran narrator Simon Vance was excellent throughout.
* A line from All Day Permanent Red (2004).
** The 1981 edition collects earlier published smaller volumes such as Patrocleia of Homer (1963), GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm) and Pax.
May 4, 2024
It's hard to put my words into thoughts about War Music - when I write a review, I (very presumptuously, I admit) want above all either to give my thoughts on a book, or to give the reader an idea of what the experience of reading the book was like. I can barely describe it here - although I know how it was and am not confused, the book itself is something of a flash of images-experience that you must experience yourself.
Essentially, Christopher Logue has rewritten the Iliad (after he was told to translate it when he knows not one word of Greek) in the fashion of a modernist poem a la T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land or something, though it has a very pronounced sense of humor; indeed sometimes it feels like Logue is memeing or shitposting because of how overt it is.
Reading it, my recurring feeling from beginning to end was that this is less a real "retelling" of the Iliad, and more a commentary on the pop culture view, or rather, variety of views all of which belong to pop culture of Homer's epic. What do I mean by that? Well, if you've ever read any retelling of any Greek myth inspired less by Homer than by notions of it and popular monographs, from any age, you know that... people don't really know what the Iliad is actually like, despite it still being widely read.
By that I mean that people either think it's Troy (2004) i.e. big Hollywood battle scenes of anonymous mass combat, or that they think it's this big patriarchal rapefest (Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls for the feminist take on that, Terence Hawkins' The Rage of Achilles for the schoolboy take of blood and cussing and rape inspired by the bicameral mind theory), or whatever generic form of macho entertainment people think the Iliad is (just looking for reviews of a piece of Trojan historical fiction, the first result informs me that "Epics are a macho branch of literature and none more so than the Illiad", lol).
Maybe they focus on the divine element and insist that the gods are simple petty bored immortals and that the war is but bloodsport for the otherwise indifferent deities (fuckin', spoiler: not true at all, either in the Iliad itself or the theological mythos as a whole, it is in fact part of Zeus' plan to exterminate the demigods, as is alluded right on the fifth verse, just like God's plan to exterminate the Nephilim (demigods like Gilgamesh, in fact) in Genesis and OT Apocrypha), and so on. God fucking knows that after Disney's Hercules a bunch of supposed "mythology buffs", who take these absolutely fascinating systems of belief, ritual and consciously fictional storytelling of the far past and treat them like some DnD taxonomy system, would take any opportunity to remind you that they knew the REAL lore and that these gods were brutal and petty and would kill people for looking at them naked while they bathed in a spring and started wars for bloodsport or what-have-you - ritual considerations, developments and splittings or joining of myths, etc, any analysis and often times even simple knowledge, be damned!
I mean that kinda thing: in my experience people tend to be very shocked when they actually read the Iliad, at how modern it feels, how timeless and enjoyable it is as a work of literature still. This happened just this year, as I read it to my partner.
It feels like Logue is writing here, a mish-mash of all those pop-culture (mis)conceptions about the Iliad - women are exclusively called "she"s, "my prize she", etc, a lot of the language is ridiculous in its misogyny, i.e. Helen's father says "This womb is now a wife" when giving her away - Helen, in fact, is called a "13 year old wife", which is rather bellow the usual marrying age at the time and in fact Theseus' rape of the child Helen was always taken as a heinous crime which vindicated his pathetic death - or for the machismo, I can't help but feel that these verses and many alike are commentaries on this notion of the Iliad as a glorification of bellicose machismo, away from the courtliness of the actual poem and its critical core towards such values:
Some of the dialogue is so unbelievably blunt and simplistic, even though Logue can write poetry, that it instinctively feels like commentary on how Agamemnon and Menelaus are portrayed in as big dumb brutes, i.e. The Song of Achilles:
How can I take that as anything but a caricature of the notion of Menelaus as a big bruttish dummy? Not entirely wrong of course. Likewise, the anachronism ( which are extremely numerous, of course, but always with a point) by which prayers and saluting are always accompanied with a Roman salute Ave! speaks to the often nationalistic, philhellenic misinterpretation.
There's also references to the archeology mania of certain Trojan war "theorists", so we have satire of more academic matters, such as mentions of the Hittites - multiple times we hear of "Hittite Anatolium" and there are references to famous Hittite architecture which, in being describe, feels like a nod to Homer himself, who so famously described in extreme accuracy the geography and architecture of Troy:
Hector is in the armour. Boran lifts
A coiling oxhorn to his lips. And though
Its summons bumps the tower where Priam sits
Beside a lip that slides
Out of a stone lion’s mouth into a pool...
[Clearly a reference to the famous Lion Gate]
There are many other things which feel like Logue is commenting on scholarship on the Iliad, though if against it or just its misconceptions, it is hard to tell. An example is Hector's constant comparisons to the Sun and ridiculously on-the-nose solar imagery almost as if to mock the theory which reads the mortal heroes as doubles of their god:
(Alternatively, this passage may also be a mockery of the Anglo scholar mania of some decades past of making a solar myth out of every heroic myth; and likewise it may still be more Hittite references for the Hittite monarchs did call themselves "My Sun").
There are countless other examples - sometimes, whole books are written outrageously, specially book 4 and 5, but the thing to note is that, despite this satirizing, this memeing on Logue's end, he is perfectly and indeed very capable of writing genuine poetry, often manifest in something as simple as the epithets of the deities, such as "The Daughter Prince, ash-eyed Athena", an amazing subversion of glaukopis and, frankly, I'm greatly impressed with "The Daughter Prince" to point out that, yes, in much of Greek myth, Athena is a boyish crossdresser, something only addressed at length in Nonnus' Dionysiaca.
The final chapter, Pax, specifically has some passages of incredible beauty, which nonetheless somehow do not break the often ridiculous, self-parodic or satirizing tone of a lot of it. But how the editor talks about it in the fragments section of Big Men Falling a Long Way makes me wonder if any of this was intentional.
In conclusion, it is a one of a kind type experience and very much worth reading - maybe more so now, because it truly feels like it's very effectively taking the piss out of the countless, soulless, BookTok-spawned Greek myth retellings, even though it came out so many decades before that was thing (though, Logue's own time had its own "bold" remakes and it's very likely he was parodying them here). I think the description of "war music" is very misleading, as combat is rarely if ever the focus: war footage if anything is more accurate, for Logue constantly and very effectively uses the imagery of cinema to "compose" his "scenes".
Essentially, Christopher Logue has rewritten the Iliad (after he was told to translate it when he knows not one word of Greek) in the fashion of a modernist poem a la T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land or something, though it has a very pronounced sense of humor; indeed sometimes it feels like Logue is memeing or shitposting because of how overt it is.
Reading it, my recurring feeling from beginning to end was that this is less a real "retelling" of the Iliad, and more a commentary on the pop culture view, or rather, variety of views all of which belong to pop culture of Homer's epic. What do I mean by that? Well, if you've ever read any retelling of any Greek myth inspired less by Homer than by notions of it and popular monographs, from any age, you know that... people don't really know what the Iliad is actually like, despite it still being widely read.
By that I mean that people either think it's Troy (2004) i.e. big Hollywood battle scenes of anonymous mass combat, or that they think it's this big patriarchal rapefest (Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls for the feminist take on that, Terence Hawkins' The Rage of Achilles for the schoolboy take of blood and cussing and rape inspired by the bicameral mind theory), or whatever generic form of macho entertainment people think the Iliad is (just looking for reviews of a piece of Trojan historical fiction, the first result informs me that "Epics are a macho branch of literature and none more so than the Illiad", lol).
Maybe they focus on the divine element and insist that the gods are simple petty bored immortals and that the war is but bloodsport for the otherwise indifferent deities (fuckin', spoiler: not true at all, either in the Iliad itself or the theological mythos as a whole, it is in fact part of Zeus' plan to exterminate the demigods, as is alluded right on the fifth verse, just like God's plan to exterminate the Nephilim (demigods like Gilgamesh, in fact) in Genesis and OT Apocrypha), and so on. God fucking knows that after Disney's Hercules a bunch of supposed "mythology buffs", who take these absolutely fascinating systems of belief, ritual and consciously fictional storytelling of the far past and treat them like some DnD taxonomy system, would take any opportunity to remind you that they knew the REAL lore and that these gods were brutal and petty and would kill people for looking at them naked while they bathed in a spring and started wars for bloodsport or what-have-you - ritual considerations, developments and splittings or joining of myths, etc, any analysis and often times even simple knowledge, be damned!
I mean that kinda thing: in my experience people tend to be very shocked when they actually read the Iliad, at how modern it feels, how timeless and enjoyable it is as a work of literature still. This happened just this year, as I read it to my partner.
It feels like Logue is writing here, a mish-mash of all those pop-culture (mis)conceptions about the Iliad - women are exclusively called "she"s, "my prize she", etc, a lot of the language is ridiculous in its misogyny, i.e. Helen's father says "This womb is now a wife" when giving her away - Helen, in fact, is called a "13 year old wife", which is rather bellow the usual marrying age at the time and in fact Theseus' rape of the child Helen was always taken as a heinous crime which vindicated his pathetic death - or for the machismo, I can't help but feel that these verses and many alike are commentaries on this notion of the Iliad as a glorification of bellicose machismo, away from the courtliness of the actual poem and its critical core towards such values:
‘Shame that your King is not so bound to you
As he is bound to what he sniffs.
Some of the dialogue is so unbelievably blunt and simplistic, even though Logue can write poetry, that it instinctively feels like commentary on how Agamemnon and Menelaus are portrayed in as big dumb brutes, i.e. The Song of Achilles:
Paris, his mirror bronze, his hair:
‘Be brave!’
‘He is more beautiful than God,’ the children cry.
But heroes are not frightened by appearances.
Under his breath lord Menelaos says:
‘I hate that man. I am going to kill that man.
I want to smash his face. I want to shout into his broken face:
You are dead. You are no longer in this world.’
How can I take that as anything but a caricature of the notion of Menelaus as a big bruttish dummy? Not entirely wrong of course. Likewise, the anachronism ( which are extremely numerous, of course, but always with a point) by which prayers and saluting are always accompanied with a Roman salute Ave! speaks to the often nationalistic, philhellenic misinterpretation.
There's also references to the archeology mania of certain Trojan war "theorists", so we have satire of more academic matters, such as mentions of the Hittites - multiple times we hear of "Hittite Anatolium" and there are references to famous Hittite architecture which, in being describe, feels like a nod to Homer himself, who so famously described in extreme accuracy the geography and architecture of Troy:
Hector is in the armour. Boran lifts
A coiling oxhorn to his lips. And though
Its summons bumps the tower where Priam sits
Beside a lip that slides
Out of a stone lion’s mouth into a pool...
[Clearly a reference to the famous Lion Gate]
There are many other things which feel like Logue is commenting on scholarship on the Iliad, though if against it or just its misconceptions, it is hard to tell. An example is Hector's constant comparisons to the Sun and ridiculously on-the-nose solar imagery almost as if to mock the theory which reads the mortal heroes as doubles of their god:
The sun,
Head of a still-surviving kingdom, drew
The earth between them and himself,
And so the plain grew dark.
(Alternatively, this passage may also be a mockery of the Anglo scholar mania of some decades past of making a solar myth out of every heroic myth; and likewise it may still be more Hittite references for the Hittite monarchs did call themselves "My Sun").
There are countless other examples - sometimes, whole books are written outrageously, specially book 4 and 5, but the thing to note is that, despite this satirizing, this memeing on Logue's end, he is perfectly and indeed very capable of writing genuine poetry, often manifest in something as simple as the epithets of the deities, such as "The Daughter Prince, ash-eyed Athena", an amazing subversion of glaukopis and, frankly, I'm greatly impressed with "The Daughter Prince" to point out that, yes, in much of Greek myth, Athena is a boyish crossdresser, something only addressed at length in Nonnus' Dionysiaca.
The final chapter, Pax, specifically has some passages of incredible beauty, which nonetheless somehow do not break the often ridiculous, self-parodic or satirizing tone of a lot of it. But how the editor talks about it in the fragments section of Big Men Falling a Long Way makes me wonder if any of this was intentional.
In conclusion, it is a one of a kind type experience and very much worth reading - maybe more so now, because it truly feels like it's very effectively taking the piss out of the countless, soulless, BookTok-spawned Greek myth retellings, even though it came out so many decades before that was thing (though, Logue's own time had its own "bold" remakes and it's very likely he was parodying them here). I think the description of "war music" is very misleading, as combat is rarely if ever the focus: war footage if anything is more accurate, for Logue constantly and very effectively uses the imagery of cinema to "compose" his "scenes".
August 11, 2024
Reading this again I think it may be my favorite book. Certainly it's in the top five. Logue's language is striking, unexpected, even jarring, yet for me it works completely. It gives me a feeling of rightness, like every word is where it ought to be. With a distinctly un-Homeric style Logue conveys what is essential about Homer's epic: a view of the world that is harsh, unsentimental, and magnificent. The poem may be filled with heroes but there are really no 'good guys'; gods as well as men are petty, violent, and vengeful. Human lives are short and the afterlife dismal, so the best anyone can do is seek honor and glory during one's brief span on Earth. The characters and scenarios of this epic take on a larger-than-life quality, and the effect is heightened by Logue's spare and vivid language. The result I can only describe using Logue's own words: unanswerable magnificence.
Read
August 29, 2016"Christopher Logue’s recent volume of poetry, War Music, holds Homer’s deft portrait of the Trojan War up to the present’s light. In the preface to his translation of Homer (1791), William Cowper stressed the 'fidelity' the translator owes to the original; however, the object of this fidelity is fluid in the contemporary era. Logue’s War Music is something other than a translation, but neither is it a collage of fragments meant to anchor us to the past; it is truly 'an account' of the source material." - Greg Brown
This book was reviewed in the September/October 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
This book was reviewed in the September/October 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
February 29, 2016
Best adaptation/translation of the Iliad I've ever read; a work of genius; pure literary art; made me swear aloud repeatedly; may have wiped away a tear or two; etc. etc. etc.
July 8, 2019
Massive
Unfinished
Brilliance
Ah, Achilles... this might be the closest anyone has come to explaining you.
Unfinished
Brilliance
Ah, Achilles... this might be the closest anyone has come to explaining you.
November 26, 2016
It is nightfall in ancient Achaea, and your goat-herding family and neighbors gather near a fire to hear a traveling minstrel sing of the fall of heroes. Or perhaps you are a citizen in the Athenian city-state, listening indoors to the foibles of the gods, so like those of your own aristocracy. Or perhaps you dwell on Leuce Island in the Black Sea, and you long for a paean to menein, a word that means rage and that is reserved for the gods alone, save one mortal, the hero patron of the cult you worship, Achilles.
But always you expect the minstrel to sing of that distant city: Troy.
Then comes a minstrel who tells the old stories like you’ve never heard them told before, in a language more like your own, but radically so, whether evoking the rapture of combat:
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!
the sensual thrill of being possessed by a god:
At Hera’s nod Athena stood beside Odysseus
And ran her finger down his spine.
Aoi!—see him move…
or the sardonic despair in Odysseus’ message to Achilles, appealing for his aid and sending news of the death of Patroclus:
Antilochos,
Run to the Fleet. Give Wondersulk our news.
His love is dead. His armour gone.
Prince Hector has the corpse. And as an afterthought,
That we are lost.
You look at the minstrel and see a messy-haired man whose life has led him many places, including Palestine, where he served in the Black Watch, and Israel, where he was court-martialed and served 16 months in prison for fraud. A man whose jobs have included acting in films by Terry Gilliam and authoring a pornographic novel. A man who fills his language with the vocabulary of screenplays, as when, following Achilles’ declaration that he will fight no more, we get: “Silence. // Reverse the shot. // Go close.” A man who does not even know Greek, but whose ear for its music is more perfectly tuned than any translator’s, as in the description of Zeus’ rites for his slain son, 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.
A modern reader would be no less astounded by Christopher Logue’s War Music: An Account of the Iliad than would those ancient Greek audiences. It is one of the most important works of literature of our time, a loose translation of the Iliad that Logue began in 1959 and published piecemeal in a number of different editions (Kings, The Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, Cold Calls, War Music, and the planned but incomplete Big Men Falling a Long Way, which the editor Christopher Reid has carefully reconstructed from the manuscripts and notes Logue left at his death in 2011).
Logue fractures the traditional, stately narration of translators like Richard Lattimore and Robert Fagles, favoring an accretion of intense lyric moments, made accessible yet uncanny with allusions to English poetry and inventive anachronisms (a device Homer himself uses, most often when referring to styles of armaments that pre-Homeric warriors could not have possessed), as in this simile for the clash of armies:
Think of the moment when far from the land
Molested by a mile-a-minute wind
The ocean starts to roll, then rear, then roar
Over itself in rank on rank of waves
Their sides so steep their smoky crests so high
300,000 plunging tons of aircraft carrier
Dare not sport its beam.
Lacking lengthy narrative explication, Logue packs his lines with information (“Be advised, / If you cannot give death the two-finger-flip / Do not fight by or against Queen Hera’s human / The son to Tydéus murderous Diomed aka The Child”) and intensifies the emotions by ventriloquizing, sometimes speaking as an anonymous Trojan or Greek, sometimes as a whole army, and sometimes inserting himself into the poem (much as the blind bard Demodocus, who sings the Phaeacians in the Odyssey, was long thought a stand-in for Homer), as when he describes the voices of a Trojan council:
Their voices rising through the still, sweet air
As once, as tourists, my friends and I
Smoked as we watched
The people of the town of Skopje
Stroll back and forth across their fountained square,
Safe in their murmur on our balcony
At dusk, not long before an earthquake tipped
Themselves and their society aside.
And Logue modernizes the narration of the Iliad with cinematic directions, often jump-cutting between close-ups of the men and panoramic views of the Trojan plain, the city, and the mountains beyond:
The ridge.
King Agamemnon views Troy’s skyline.
Windmills. Palms.
‘It will be ours by dark.’
His depictions of divine power are rendered with a hip irony that makes the gods more mortal than the mortals in their whims and anger. Consider the scene when Menelaus, fighting in winner-takes-all single combat against Paris, breaks his sword, and in the pause Aphrodite intervenes to save Paris:
A hundred of us pitch our sword to him…
Yet even as they flew, their blades
Changed into wings, their pommels into heads,
Their hilts to feathered chests, and what were swords
Were turned to doves, a swirl of doves,
And waltzing out of it, in oyster silk,
Running her tongue around her strawberry lips
While repositioning a spaghetti shoulder-strap,
The Queen of Love, Our Lady Aphrodite.
(Casting possibilities: Kate Upton, Anita Ekberg.) Logue never lets us forget that the gods are ever-present in our lives: “Dawn stepped barefooted from her lover’s bed / And shared her beauty with the gods, / Who are as then; and with ourselves, as now.”
In contrast with the slow-motion scenes of divine activity, the battle scenes might well have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah: lurid, quick-paced, and intense, they draw out the profound violence of Homer’s poem and reset it in a contemporary idiom. We see it in Diomedes’ divinely inspired war rage:
Her power [Hera] surging through him, he
Cast as leapt at them; barbecued three;
Crashed through their coffin-tops’
Gaffed his plume dead; cut fillets out of those;
His masks behind him through the gap
Him making for the rise topped by Prince Hector’s vulture plume.
and we hear it in the noise of battle: “And dear my God, the noise! / As if the hides from which 10,000 shields were made / Came back to life and bellowed all at once.” Logue hyperbolizes the grotesquerie of battle with images of horrifying brutality, like the mounting of Nyro’s bell-braided head atop a spear in a parody of the jester’s marotte, and with one-liners worthy of a 1980s Schwarzenegger film, as when the trumpeter Teléspiax takes an arrow to the head that was meant for Hector and says, “My Prince, your trumpeter has lost his breath,” or when Aphrodite complains to Zeus about the wound she received from Diomedes: “Human strikes God! Communism! The end of everything!”
If such moments risk drifting into farce, Logue rights them with piercing insights about the combat experience:
[T]he battle has as battles do
Found its own voice, that, presently far off
Blends with the sound of clear bright water as it falls
Over their covert’s mossy heights.
and with meditations on war Stephen Crane might have written, bleak realist poems:
Moments like these absolve the needs dividing men.
Whatever caught and brought and kept them here
Is lost: and for a while they join a terrible equality,
Are virtuous, self-sacrificing, free:
And so insidious is this liberty
That those surviving it will bear
An even greater servitude to its root:
Believing they were whole, while they were brave,
That they were rich, because their loot was great;
That war was meaningful, because they lost their friends.
But you and your fellow Greek audience have come to hear the minstrel sing not of war in general, but of the war at Troy, and of the fall of its heroes: Agamemnon, Priam, Hector, Patroclus, Achilles. The stories, like the men’s fates, are already known, and Logue does not tamper with them, allowing us to experience Agamemnon’s egomaniacal stupidity, Ajax’s single-minded devotion to his men, Helen’s brave but ultimately hopeless defiance of Aphrodite. But in the heroes’ speeches, Logue shifts to a loose blank verse that intensifies the pathos of “big men falling a long way,” as Logue defines tragedy. It is there in Patroclus’ dying words to Hector, which remind us that when men kill each other in war, they are also killing themselves:
I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet
Somehow it sounds like Hector.
And as I close my eyes I see Achilles’ face
With Death’s voice coming out of it.
Logue forces us to grieve with Achilles over this loss, and the intense physicality of Achilles’ misery strikes us again and again with Logue’s skillful repetitions and his direct commands:
Down on your knees, Achilles. Further down.
Now forward on your hands and thrust your face into the filth,
Push filth into your open eyes, and howling, howling,
Sprawled howling, howling in the filth,
Ripping out locks of your long redcurrant-coloured hair,
Trowel up its dogshit with your mouth.
And Logue captures the sheer hatred fueling Achilles’ revenge when he depicts him staring at the divinely-forged armor his mother, the Nereid Thetis, has brought him: “Slitting his eyes against the flare, some said, / But others thought the hatred shuttered by his lids / Made him protect the metal.”
Logue’s death in 2011 left War Music unfinished, and some scenes that readers of Homer most appreciate and use to judge the translator’s art are missing, including the warm family interaction between Hector, his wife Andromache, and their infant son Astyanax (who ultimately will be thrown from the ramparts by Achilles’ son Neoptolemus, his mother taken as Neoptolemus’ slave); Achilles’s defiant address to Hector, when he tells him “There can be no covenants between lions and men”; and the culminating fight, when Achilles slays Hector and seals his own fate.
But in the section titled Big Men Falling a Long Way, editor Christopher Reid gives us tantalizing glimpses of Logue at work. Reid provides, for example, Logue’s “Poss. Sims,” extended similes he could deploy at appropriate moments in the poem (just as the ancient Homeric poets would have done in their oral performances), as well as several scenes in various stages of development, the most important of which is Achilles’ encounter with Priam, when the Trojan King sneaks into the Greek camp to beg for the corpse of his son Hector. Logue weaves the plaintive plea of Priam’s speech into the narration, muting its drama, perhaps, but deepening its power:
Beside these steps they parked King Priam’s litter,
Where, but above him, lord Achilles, waiting, let
The old king get himself up out of it
Onto the stage, and, kneeling, kiss his hands:
The hands that killed his son.
Logue’s death also prevented him from composing the famous description of Achilles’ shield. But Reid supplies us with Logue’s tantalizing note, in which he described his plans: “Homer describes the creation in Heaven of a new shield […] The new shield’s face is covered with designs that show the world as Homer knew it. This passage will be extended. The pictures on the shield will reflect our world.”
No minstrel would ever tell the whole Iliad in one sitting, and so Logue’s abrupt departure connects us once more with those ancient audiences. We will never have the vision of a shield reflecting Achilles’ world and ours. But in another way, we do have it, we have Logue’s War Music, and by staring into its unfinished yet gleaming surface, we glimpse past, present, and future at once. Like Achilles with his armor, we can stare into “the holy tungsten like a star.”
But always you expect the minstrel to sing of that distant city: Troy.
Then comes a minstrel who tells the old stories like you’ve never heard them told before, in a language more like your own, but radically so, whether evoking the rapture of combat:
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!
the sensual thrill of being possessed by a god:
At Hera’s nod Athena stood beside Odysseus
And ran her finger down his spine.
Aoi!—see him move…
or the sardonic despair in Odysseus’ message to Achilles, appealing for his aid and sending news of the death of Patroclus:
Antilochos,
Run to the Fleet. Give Wondersulk our news.
His love is dead. His armour gone.
Prince Hector has the corpse. And as an afterthought,
That we are lost.
You look at the minstrel and see a messy-haired man whose life has led him many places, including Palestine, where he served in the Black Watch, and Israel, where he was court-martialed and served 16 months in prison for fraud. A man whose jobs have included acting in films by Terry Gilliam and authoring a pornographic novel. A man who fills his language with the vocabulary of screenplays, as when, following Achilles’ declaration that he will fight no more, we get: “Silence. // Reverse the shot. // Go close.” A man who does not even know Greek, but whose ear for its music is more perfectly tuned than any translator’s, as in the description of Zeus’ rites for his slain son, 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.
A modern reader would be no less astounded by Christopher Logue’s War Music: An Account of the Iliad than would those ancient Greek audiences. It is one of the most important works of literature of our time, a loose translation of the Iliad that Logue began in 1959 and published piecemeal in a number of different editions (Kings, The Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, Cold Calls, War Music, and the planned but incomplete Big Men Falling a Long Way, which the editor Christopher Reid has carefully reconstructed from the manuscripts and notes Logue left at his death in 2011).
Logue fractures the traditional, stately narration of translators like Richard Lattimore and Robert Fagles, favoring an accretion of intense lyric moments, made accessible yet uncanny with allusions to English poetry and inventive anachronisms (a device Homer himself uses, most often when referring to styles of armaments that pre-Homeric warriors could not have possessed), as in this simile for the clash of armies:
Think of the moment when far from the land
Molested by a mile-a-minute wind
The ocean starts to roll, then rear, then roar
Over itself in rank on rank of waves
Their sides so steep their smoky crests so high
300,000 plunging tons of aircraft carrier
Dare not sport its beam.
Lacking lengthy narrative explication, Logue packs his lines with information (“Be advised, / If you cannot give death the two-finger-flip / Do not fight by or against Queen Hera’s human / The son to Tydéus murderous Diomed aka The Child”) and intensifies the emotions by ventriloquizing, sometimes speaking as an anonymous Trojan or Greek, sometimes as a whole army, and sometimes inserting himself into the poem (much as the blind bard Demodocus, who sings the Phaeacians in the Odyssey, was long thought a stand-in for Homer), as when he describes the voices of a Trojan council:
Their voices rising through the still, sweet air
As once, as tourists, my friends and I
Smoked as we watched
The people of the town of Skopje
Stroll back and forth across their fountained square,
Safe in their murmur on our balcony
At dusk, not long before an earthquake tipped
Themselves and their society aside.
And Logue modernizes the narration of the Iliad with cinematic directions, often jump-cutting between close-ups of the men and panoramic views of the Trojan plain, the city, and the mountains beyond:
The ridge.
King Agamemnon views Troy’s skyline.
Windmills. Palms.
‘It will be ours by dark.’
His depictions of divine power are rendered with a hip irony that makes the gods more mortal than the mortals in their whims and anger. Consider the scene when Menelaus, fighting in winner-takes-all single combat against Paris, breaks his sword, and in the pause Aphrodite intervenes to save Paris:
A hundred of us pitch our sword to him…
Yet even as they flew, their blades
Changed into wings, their pommels into heads,
Their hilts to feathered chests, and what were swords
Were turned to doves, a swirl of doves,
And waltzing out of it, in oyster silk,
Running her tongue around her strawberry lips
While repositioning a spaghetti shoulder-strap,
The Queen of Love, Our Lady Aphrodite.
(Casting possibilities: Kate Upton, Anita Ekberg.) Logue never lets us forget that the gods are ever-present in our lives: “Dawn stepped barefooted from her lover’s bed / And shared her beauty with the gods, / Who are as then; and with ourselves, as now.”
In contrast with the slow-motion scenes of divine activity, the battle scenes might well have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah: lurid, quick-paced, and intense, they draw out the profound violence of Homer’s poem and reset it in a contemporary idiom. We see it in Diomedes’ divinely inspired war rage:
Her power [Hera] surging through him, he
Cast as leapt at them; barbecued three;
Crashed through their coffin-tops’
Gaffed his plume dead; cut fillets out of those;
His masks behind him through the gap
Him making for the rise topped by Prince Hector’s vulture plume.
and we hear it in the noise of battle: “And dear my God, the noise! / As if the hides from which 10,000 shields were made / Came back to life and bellowed all at once.” Logue hyperbolizes the grotesquerie of battle with images of horrifying brutality, like the mounting of Nyro’s bell-braided head atop a spear in a parody of the jester’s marotte, and with one-liners worthy of a 1980s Schwarzenegger film, as when the trumpeter Teléspiax takes an arrow to the head that was meant for Hector and says, “My Prince, your trumpeter has lost his breath,” or when Aphrodite complains to Zeus about the wound she received from Diomedes: “Human strikes God! Communism! The end of everything!”
If such moments risk drifting into farce, Logue rights them with piercing insights about the combat experience:
[T]he battle has as battles do
Found its own voice, that, presently far off
Blends with the sound of clear bright water as it falls
Over their covert’s mossy heights.
and with meditations on war Stephen Crane might have written, bleak realist poems:
Moments like these absolve the needs dividing men.
Whatever caught and brought and kept them here
Is lost: and for a while they join a terrible equality,
Are virtuous, self-sacrificing, free:
And so insidious is this liberty
That those surviving it will bear
An even greater servitude to its root:
Believing they were whole, while they were brave,
That they were rich, because their loot was great;
That war was meaningful, because they lost their friends.
But you and your fellow Greek audience have come to hear the minstrel sing not of war in general, but of the war at Troy, and of the fall of its heroes: Agamemnon, Priam, Hector, Patroclus, Achilles. The stories, like the men’s fates, are already known, and Logue does not tamper with them, allowing us to experience Agamemnon’s egomaniacal stupidity, Ajax’s single-minded devotion to his men, Helen’s brave but ultimately hopeless defiance of Aphrodite. But in the heroes’ speeches, Logue shifts to a loose blank verse that intensifies the pathos of “big men falling a long way,” as Logue defines tragedy. It is there in Patroclus’ dying words to Hector, which remind us that when men kill each other in war, they are also killing themselves:
I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet
Somehow it sounds like Hector.
And as I close my eyes I see Achilles’ face
With Death’s voice coming out of it.
Logue forces us to grieve with Achilles over this loss, and the intense physicality of Achilles’ misery strikes us again and again with Logue’s skillful repetitions and his direct commands:
Down on your knees, Achilles. Further down.
Now forward on your hands and thrust your face into the filth,
Push filth into your open eyes, and howling, howling,
Sprawled howling, howling in the filth,
Ripping out locks of your long redcurrant-coloured hair,
Trowel up its dogshit with your mouth.
And Logue captures the sheer hatred fueling Achilles’ revenge when he depicts him staring at the divinely-forged armor his mother, the Nereid Thetis, has brought him: “Slitting his eyes against the flare, some said, / But others thought the hatred shuttered by his lids / Made him protect the metal.”
Logue’s death in 2011 left War Music unfinished, and some scenes that readers of Homer most appreciate and use to judge the translator’s art are missing, including the warm family interaction between Hector, his wife Andromache, and their infant son Astyanax (who ultimately will be thrown from the ramparts by Achilles’ son Neoptolemus, his mother taken as Neoptolemus’ slave); Achilles’s defiant address to Hector, when he tells him “There can be no covenants between lions and men”; and the culminating fight, when Achilles slays Hector and seals his own fate.
But in the section titled Big Men Falling a Long Way, editor Christopher Reid gives us tantalizing glimpses of Logue at work. Reid provides, for example, Logue’s “Poss. Sims,” extended similes he could deploy at appropriate moments in the poem (just as the ancient Homeric poets would have done in their oral performances), as well as several scenes in various stages of development, the most important of which is Achilles’ encounter with Priam, when the Trojan King sneaks into the Greek camp to beg for the corpse of his son Hector. Logue weaves the plaintive plea of Priam’s speech into the narration, muting its drama, perhaps, but deepening its power:
Beside these steps they parked King Priam’s litter,
Where, but above him, lord Achilles, waiting, let
The old king get himself up out of it
Onto the stage, and, kneeling, kiss his hands:
The hands that killed his son.
Logue’s death also prevented him from composing the famous description of Achilles’ shield. But Reid supplies us with Logue’s tantalizing note, in which he described his plans: “Homer describes the creation in Heaven of a new shield […] The new shield’s face is covered with designs that show the world as Homer knew it. This passage will be extended. The pictures on the shield will reflect our world.”
No minstrel would ever tell the whole Iliad in one sitting, and so Logue’s abrupt departure connects us once more with those ancient audiences. We will never have the vision of a shield reflecting Achilles’ world and ours. But in another way, we do have it, we have Logue’s War Music, and by staring into its unfinished yet gleaming surface, we glimpse past, present, and future at once. Like Achilles with his armor, we can stare into “the holy tungsten like a star.”
November 7, 2025
I've finally finished War Music. I first encountered this text in a course on literary translation in my undergraduate years--spring of 2024. I visited my friend Madi in New York City that August and the two of us bought copies of this edition--a posthumous compilation of every published segment of Logue's Homer, including fragmentary bits found in his private collection after he passed--at the Strand, in the East Village. She read it much faster than I.
I first started reading War Music in late August 2024, still an undergraduate. I would sit in my favorite spot on campus and read from the text, aloud. Those days I had a habit of reading aloud (declaiming, even) on campus; indeed, I read much of Milton's Areopagitica that way, and my understanding of the text was all the better for it. I remember being so excited by War Music that when my friend Lukas walked by me declaiming one day, I walked with him to the law school so I could read him a passage. I quickly got too busy with school (chiefly with reading Ulysses, for who can handle more than one Modernist masterwork at a time? I should add that I will now be moving to Djuna Barnes' Nightwood) and put the book down until this September, more than an entire year later.
War Music is delightfully odd and excellent in the way that Homer is. The Modernist classicizing ethos of bypassing all intermediate receptions and coming into direct contact with an ancient Greek work in order to transform it for the Industrial, Desolate Now will always produce for the reader something delightfully odd and excellent. Logue's music is to be heard, and so this sprawling poem (or collection of (micro-)poems, on which see below) should be read aloud when possible, if only quietly to yourself on the subway or at the park, or even just by mouthing the words. There were times where I felt less hooked by the text, but this only occurred when I read the text solely in my head. Don't let the poetry, which is mostly aural, pass you by.
To move from the aural to the oral: this compilation of War Music spans many years and thus includes many inconsistencies. This is a good thing. Names are not always spelled and/or accented the same, text is not always sized and aligned the same. It gives the reader-listener a sense of narratorial plurality (for is a man not many men over many years of his life?), and in a charming way this replicates (or, better, Modernizes) the circumstances of the oral composition of the Iliad. As with that poem (if you believe in something like the Peisistratid recension) War Music was never one whole poem, but a collection of smaller poems (smaller even at the level of individual stanzas, on which see the next sentence) assembled into a whole by a later editor (Christopher Reid, who has done a great job) with limited access to the mind of the original tradition. Individual stanzas, because in Reid's appendix we see that Logue composed Poss Sim (possible similes) with no designated place in the larger narrative; Logue's oral, musical account of the Iliad is a unity of disparate parts, a sensation strengthened only by the relentless anachronism--the parts are now not just poetic units but chronologies, religions, linguistic registers.
It's spectacular. And as with Homer, you won't like every part of it. I didn't, I don't. But I love it all.
Reid's appendix makes me mourn for what we cannot have. Logue intended to compose an account of the shield of Achilles which would have taken the anachronisms of the rest of this work to a whole other level. I wish we had it. But the fragmentary and incomplete nature of this project only strengthens its purpose. I long for these such elements as I long for the Epic Cycle, as I long for the Hectorean proto-Doloneia (if you buy the argument in Christos Tsagalis' new book, which I think I do). There is so much poetry I wish we had. I long for it. But such longing only makes me more appreciative of what we do have.
"I know I will not make old bones."
I first started reading War Music in late August 2024, still an undergraduate. I would sit in my favorite spot on campus and read from the text, aloud. Those days I had a habit of reading aloud (declaiming, even) on campus; indeed, I read much of Milton's Areopagitica that way, and my understanding of the text was all the better for it. I remember being so excited by War Music that when my friend Lukas walked by me declaiming one day, I walked with him to the law school so I could read him a passage. I quickly got too busy with school (chiefly with reading Ulysses, for who can handle more than one Modernist masterwork at a time? I should add that I will now be moving to Djuna Barnes' Nightwood) and put the book down until this September, more than an entire year later.
War Music is delightfully odd and excellent in the way that Homer is. The Modernist classicizing ethos of bypassing all intermediate receptions and coming into direct contact with an ancient Greek work in order to transform it for the Industrial, Desolate Now will always produce for the reader something delightfully odd and excellent. Logue's music is to be heard, and so this sprawling poem (or collection of (micro-)poems, on which see below) should be read aloud when possible, if only quietly to yourself on the subway or at the park, or even just by mouthing the words. There were times where I felt less hooked by the text, but this only occurred when I read the text solely in my head. Don't let the poetry, which is mostly aural, pass you by.
To move from the aural to the oral: this compilation of War Music spans many years and thus includes many inconsistencies. This is a good thing. Names are not always spelled and/or accented the same, text is not always sized and aligned the same. It gives the reader-listener a sense of narratorial plurality (for is a man not many men over many years of his life?), and in a charming way this replicates (or, better, Modernizes) the circumstances of the oral composition of the Iliad. As with that poem (if you believe in something like the Peisistratid recension) War Music was never one whole poem, but a collection of smaller poems (smaller even at the level of individual stanzas, on which see the next sentence) assembled into a whole by a later editor (Christopher Reid, who has done a great job) with limited access to the mind of the original tradition. Individual stanzas, because in Reid's appendix we see that Logue composed Poss Sim (possible similes) with no designated place in the larger narrative; Logue's oral, musical account of the Iliad is a unity of disparate parts, a sensation strengthened only by the relentless anachronism--the parts are now not just poetic units but chronologies, religions, linguistic registers.
It's spectacular. And as with Homer, you won't like every part of it. I didn't, I don't. But I love it all.
Reid's appendix makes me mourn for what we cannot have. Logue intended to compose an account of the shield of Achilles which would have taken the anachronisms of the rest of this work to a whole other level. I wish we had it. But the fragmentary and incomplete nature of this project only strengthens its purpose. I long for these such elements as I long for the Epic Cycle, as I long for the Hectorean proto-Doloneia (if you buy the argument in Christos Tsagalis' new book, which I think I do). There is so much poetry I wish we had. I long for it. But such longing only makes me more appreciative of what we do have.
"I know I will not make old bones."
November 17, 2025
An unparalleled achievement of emotion, verse, form and language. Logue’s vocabulary and deployment of it is nothing short of exemplary; time and again I would simply laugh at the ingenuity of his similes and metaphors - his comparisons of one thing to another being unthinkable beforehand and yet perfectly apt afterwards. To interpret and re-establish Homer directly from epic is a task of gargantuan proportions and yet Logue meets it masterfully to create a blending of the psyches and talents of two poets belonging to different worlds but unified in their terrifying understanding of the human soul and heart and blood. It is deeply saddening that Logue could not complete the entirety of his account before his death and yet the volume that we do possess remains beautifully substantial and moving. Often I was moved to tears simply due to the quality of the work and language. This is one of the best works I have had the pleasure to meet, undoubtedly. A work I will revisit if only to catch another glimpse into the bright depths of humanity and their doings.
‘O friend, I would be glad if all the Greeks lay dead while you and I demolished Troy alone.’
‘O friend, I would be glad if all the Greeks lay dead while you and I demolished Troy alone.’
Read
July 26, 2020An incomplete recreation of the Illiad, brilliantly capturing the spirit of this foundational human text in vivid colloquial English. Enormously enjoyable to see the the classic figures of myth reworked, with Athena a spoiled, precocious child and Ulysses crooked as an elbow. Alas that it's unfinished, and the best bits never made the page. Still worth your time.
December 4, 2019
Disjointed. Not at all memorable.
Read
April 3, 2024Loved!
December 12, 2015
I'm going to be rereading this for a long time.
This is the most complete version of ‘War Music’, Christopher Logue ‘account’ of the Iliad that was unfinished when he died.
Although I'd heard great things about it, I avoided 'War Music' for decades, put off by the fact it had Homer and the Iliad in the title. I had read translations of the Iliad but whether in prose or regular verse, reading felt I as though I were discharging an obligation. It was like intellectual weight lifting: good for something but not very enjoyable.
Then the shock and awe and delight of reading Logue’s version. This is not a ‘translation’, hence ‘an account’. But even unfinished, it may be one of the finest long poems of the twentieth century.
This new Hardback edition includes ‘All Day Permanent Red” (books 5-6) and ‘Cold Calls’ (books 7-9) which are missing from the 2001 ‘Logue’s Homer: War Music’ edition, as well as ’Big Men Falling a Long Way’ fragments of what would have been books 10-24. It also includes explanatory notes by the editor Christopher Reid on the fragments and their editing and an expanded section of 'Author's notes'.
Logue acknowledged his debt to Eliot: Eliot for inspiration, Pound for instruction, Yeats for pleasure. But amongst the many problems the Modernist poets left to their successors was how to write a long narrative poem. They wrote long poems, but they tended to avoid narrative and so their long poems were often confused and rambling. And since most of them started out as minimalists of one kind or another, the problem of how to provide narrative information without resorting to what must have felt like chopped prose was one they didn’t solve.
I think Logue did solve that problem and for that alone this is worth reading. However, it’s also enjoyable story telling. He moves at a pace that is not Homer’s telling a version of Homer’s story. Logue’s story jumps and dazzles. His lines sing.
He worked on this from 1959 onwards. The quality is remarkably consistent. There is an irony in the fact that Cold Calls, which won the Whitbread prize for poetry in 2005 as a single volume seems to be the weakest of the books.
Anyone who has read parts of this needs this book to see it as a whole. And if you want to see how you solve the problem of applying modernist poetics to narrative, you need to read this book. If you’re interested in the long poem in the twentieth century, you should read this book.
If you’re studying Homer, you probably don’t need this book as you’ll be lured into reading Logue and that earnest academic translation of the Iliad your teachers or professors suggested will remain unopened and unread.
Otherwise, read this book. It’s like Briggflatts. Unavoidable. Throw in Tom Meyer’s translation of Beowulf and that’s the three books covering long poems for your desert island.
This is the most complete version of ‘War Music’, Christopher Logue ‘account’ of the Iliad that was unfinished when he died.
Although I'd heard great things about it, I avoided 'War Music' for decades, put off by the fact it had Homer and the Iliad in the title. I had read translations of the Iliad but whether in prose or regular verse, reading felt I as though I were discharging an obligation. It was like intellectual weight lifting: good for something but not very enjoyable.
Then the shock and awe and delight of reading Logue’s version. This is not a ‘translation’, hence ‘an account’. But even unfinished, it may be one of the finest long poems of the twentieth century.
This new Hardback edition includes ‘All Day Permanent Red” (books 5-6) and ‘Cold Calls’ (books 7-9) which are missing from the 2001 ‘Logue’s Homer: War Music’ edition, as well as ’Big Men Falling a Long Way’ fragments of what would have been books 10-24. It also includes explanatory notes by the editor Christopher Reid on the fragments and their editing and an expanded section of 'Author's notes'.
Logue acknowledged his debt to Eliot: Eliot for inspiration, Pound for instruction, Yeats for pleasure. But amongst the many problems the Modernist poets left to their successors was how to write a long narrative poem. They wrote long poems, but they tended to avoid narrative and so their long poems were often confused and rambling. And since most of them started out as minimalists of one kind or another, the problem of how to provide narrative information without resorting to what must have felt like chopped prose was one they didn’t solve.
I think Logue did solve that problem and for that alone this is worth reading. However, it’s also enjoyable story telling. He moves at a pace that is not Homer’s telling a version of Homer’s story. Logue’s story jumps and dazzles. His lines sing.
He worked on this from 1959 onwards. The quality is remarkably consistent. There is an irony in the fact that Cold Calls, which won the Whitbread prize for poetry in 2005 as a single volume seems to be the weakest of the books.
Anyone who has read parts of this needs this book to see it as a whole. And if you want to see how you solve the problem of applying modernist poetics to narrative, you need to read this book. If you’re interested in the long poem in the twentieth century, you should read this book.
If you’re studying Homer, you probably don’t need this book as you’ll be lured into reading Logue and that earnest academic translation of the Iliad your teachers or professors suggested will remain unopened and unread.
Otherwise, read this book. It’s like Briggflatts. Unavoidable. Throw in Tom Meyer’s translation of Beowulf and that’s the three books covering long poems for your desert island.
November 1, 2021
I love epic poetry, a genre that sees few additions these days to its canon. The 'Iliad' is one of its grandest, or at least one of its best-known, examples. Discarding questions of authorship, it is a brilliant tour de force of writing and language and imagery. So there's that. Dare I say Logue does it better? OK, that might be difficult to support, seeing as how 'War Music' is an unfinished work. Still, incomplete, it bears stating it is an epic as it stands, and stand it does, all on its own, beside Homer's classic. Maybe better is too simple a comparative, or too easy, or off the mark. 'War Music' doesn't exist without 'Iliad', so how could it exceed its source material, considering the source material's greatness? Regardless, 'War Music' is simply stellar. An expansion of 'Iliad', maybe. For me it is 'Iliad' with shackles removed and new forms of language and linguistics and poetry applied. 'Iliad' if Homer had modern sensibilities? Impossible to know and useless to consider. Homer was "of his time", Logue "of his". I could read works like 'War Music' all the time, whether based on older texts, or uniquely created from none at all. I love the unstructured nature of the work and the freedoms it is allowed. I would have loved to read 'War Music' completed, I cannot even imagine how astounding it might have been. And while the Editor's Note was a tantalizing glimpse into 'work in progress', I read it with a hint of sadness and a smidgen of remove, since one is hard-pressed to know if what is presented would have been retained in its current word array. Not that it differed much from what was published by Logue in its power and feeling and scope, but with hints at re-writing even those volumes that were complete in their partiality, I can glory in the skill of Logue while knowing I will never know his true finished intentions. 'War Music' is an epic deferred, outstanding, suspended between its beginnings and some future, impossible completion.
July 20, 2022
War Music was recommended to me years ago, but like with so many books, it took me a while to get around to. It is an unfinished work of poetry by Christopher Logue, and the complete and incomplete parts were compiled and published after his death by editor Christopher Reid. It is an account of the Iliad with the essence still there, but retold in more modern poetry that feels very unique to Logue.
I really enjoyed the mix of the classical and modern in the poetry and I thought the style was interesting. As I've read the Iliad quite a few times, I didn't have a hard time following the plot, and I was able to note the differences Logue made and think about why. There were some really striking lines and images in the account as a whole and I did enjoy reading it.
However, I do think this would be difficult to understand if you aren't familiar with the original. Even I was confused quite a lot by some of the changed character names and events. Logue references more modern events too, but I don't know if it's a generational thing but a lot of it went over my head and I couldn't follow the references. Some of this may be because it wasn't finished, though, and I would try more by Christopher Logue in the future.
I really enjoyed the mix of the classical and modern in the poetry and I thought the style was interesting. As I've read the Iliad quite a few times, I didn't have a hard time following the plot, and I was able to note the differences Logue made and think about why. There were some really striking lines and images in the account as a whole and I did enjoy reading it.
However, I do think this would be difficult to understand if you aren't familiar with the original. Even I was confused quite a lot by some of the changed character names and events. Logue references more modern events too, but I don't know if it's a generational thing but a lot of it went over my head and I couldn't follow the references. Some of this may be because it wasn't finished, though, and I would try more by Christopher Logue in the future.
July 11, 2025
A different take on the Iliad, neither a translation nor a complete re-think. The poetry is uneven, but at its best it is utterly superb:
And it was here that Thestor, Enop’s boy, Met that circumstance in nature Gods call Fate, and on this day, men called Patroclus.
And if at noon the King says: “It is night” – Behold, the stars!
She joined my stock in recognition of My strength, my courage, my superiority. Courtesy of yourselves, my lords.
I will not fight for him. He aims to personalise my loss. Briseis taken from Achilles – standard practice: Helen from Menelaos – war.
Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly
Emptying her blood-red mouth set in her ice-white face
Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:
‘Kill! Kill for me! Better to die than to live without killing!’
Who says prayer does no good?
And it was here that Thestor, Enop’s boy, Met that circumstance in nature Gods call Fate, and on this day, men called Patroclus.
And if at noon the King says: “It is night” – Behold, the stars!
She joined my stock in recognition of My strength, my courage, my superiority. Courtesy of yourselves, my lords.
I will not fight for him. He aims to personalise my loss. Briseis taken from Achilles – standard practice: Helen from Menelaos – war.
Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly
Emptying her blood-red mouth set in her ice-white face
Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:
‘Kill! Kill for me! Better to die than to live without killing!’
Who says prayer does no good?
December 27, 2016
One of the best books I've read this year.
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