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Logue spends 21 pages on his
preamble and setting for the poem, recounting the sacking of the
city (Homer names it Tenedos, Logue calls it Tollo), and has
Achilles narrate a part of the story to his mother, the goddess
Thetis. In Homer’s work, Achilles does not go to his mother
until after the quarrel. This provides a fresh perspective for
those already familiar with Homer’s poem. As Logue says,
"I concocted a new story line, and then, knowing the gist
of what this or that character said, tried to make their voices
come alive and to keep the action on the move." And he
succeeded.
War music is
still in progress, begun in the early 60s by a poet who knew no
Greek and who began by studying scholarly and not-so-scholarly
translations. As he notes, "My reading on the subject of
translation has produced at least one important opinion: ‘We
must try its effect as an English poem… Boswell reports
Johnson as saying." In producing a poem (in English), Logue
has done a wonderful job. In recreating the Greek world, Homer’s
world, without quite giving us Homer’s language, he has given
the reader a sense of the Homeric epic: he has fleshed out Homer’s
poem, given it the urgency of epic drama.
The Illiad, it
has often been repeated, is a poem about war. It is, however,
not a glorification of war, but sometimes a recording of the
dire necessities of its savagery and stupidity, of its manly and
aggressive virtues. For the ancient Greeks, however, Homer’s
work was not simply a poem. Homer was called the educator of all
Greeks. It was he, as Herodotus said, who gave the Greeks their
religion. For us, from the distance of more than two millennia,
the poem is a unique window into a world that is the cradle of
western civilization. Logue’s Homer gives the modern (western,
perhaps English) reader an insight into these strange and
distant times; an exciting poetic encounter with the riches of
Homer’s poetic vision. Logue looks upon the same landscape,
from another apercu. Here’s Hera speaking to her husband Zeus,
Rain Over
Europe
Queen Hera puts
her hate-filled face around its fall,
And says to
God:
‘I want Troy
dead.
Its swimming
pools and cellars filled with limbs;
Its race,
rotten beneath the rubble oozing pus;
Even at noon
the Dardanelle’s lit up;
All that is
left a bloodstain by the sea.’
‘Hold on…’
‘No, no,’(wagging
a finger in his face),
‘I shall not
stop. You shall not make me stop.
Troy asks for
peace? Troy shall have peace. The peace of the dead.
Or You will
have no peace until it does.’
The poetry is crisp. It is in
English. The sentiment is Greek.
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WAR
Music describes itself as an "account of Books 1-4 and
16-19 of Homer’s Iliad." This is a modest subheading
appended to the title. Christopher Logue is a poet, and has
written a poem around and within the text of Homer’s great
work. It is clearly not a translation, if by a translation we
mean a line by line rendering of Homer’s Greek into Logue’s
English; and yet there is some turning of classical Greek into
modern English which is not all Homer and yet not all that far
from Homer. Consider the epithets that Homer has for his gods:
glaukopis (ox-eyed), often applied to a goddess, a mark
perhaps of beauty in the Greek but strikingly odd in English.
Logue gives us alternatives: lake-eyed, prussic eyed (perhaps
for ‘grey-eyed’), all of which work well. They give us a
feeling not so much of Homer’s Greek but of Homer’s poetry
and his poetic world, where the recurrent image is
nevertheless unfamiliar (to us) in its effect.
