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published volumes War Music , Kings , The Husbands , All Day Permanent Red , and Cold Calls , along with previously unpublished material, in one final illuminating volume arranged by his friend and fellow poet Christopher Reid.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 ).