The New York Times Book Review - Jeffrey Brown
In his introduction to the popular Iliad translation by Robert Fagles, the classicist Bernard Knox writes that the language of Homer was "brimful of archaisms—of vocabulary, syntax and grammar—and of incongruities: words and forms drawn from different dialects and different stages of the growth of the language." Homer, that is, was strange from the beginning, wonderfully, heroically strange. And Logue, in turn, is wonderfully, Homerically strange. Somehow, in an age when the humanities are said to be fighting for their lives…Homer continues to be read. He certainly continues to be translated…He also continues to be wrestled with by our own contemporary poets…Why this continued engagement? Perhaps because the idea of endless war is as fresh as this morning's headline, the latest tweet. Perhaps because some things are just worth holding on to, and seeing again, in our own light. In War Music, Christopher Logue has worked from what is still the greatest story of war ever told and created a vivid and fresh poem in a language he knew very well, indeed.
From the Publisher
"This is not Homer: it’s Logue’s Homer. Like all translations, it departs fundamentally from the language of the original. Unlike many translations, it arrives at a version that, because of its radical departures, gets us closer to the original than many more defensibly 'faithful' translations have ever managed . . . " —Wyatt Mason, New York Times Magazine
"I still grasp Zeus by the knees and ask that he bless the translators. And Christopher Logue, among them, bless him highly . . . [Homer's Iliad] was strange from the beginning, wonderfully, heroically strange. And Logue, in turn, is wonderfully, Homerically strange . . ." —Jeffrey Brown, New York Times Book Review
Library Journal
02/15/2016
Poet, actor, and playwright Logue's passing in 2011, age 85, prevented the completion of Big Men Falling a Long Way, the sixth part of his poetic reimagining of Homer's Iliad. Poet Reid (A Scattering) has edited the extent notes and manuscripts, arranging them with the published installments War Music (1981), Kings (1991), The Husbands (1995), All Permanent Red (2003), and Cold Calls (2005) to produce this collective volume. Logue's irreverent, idiosyncratic, and distinctive take on the Iliad, much in the form and spirit of Ezra Pound's "make it new" approach, is neither translation nor imitation. The free verse plays on the narrative gaps in Homer to deliver a dynamic and provocative parallel epic, capturing the temptations and the horror of war, relating as much the anxiety of Achilles as the warrior's rage. Like Alice Oswald's elegiac Memorial, Logue illuminates the complex human dimensions implicit in Homer's verse. VERDICT While necessarily incomplete, this work is highly recommended for the insight it brings to the Iliad and also as a powerful and original work in its own right.—Thomas L. Cooksey, formerly with Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah
