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
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
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, along with previously unpublished material, in one final illuminating volume arranged by his friend and fellow poet Christopher Reid.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,
, 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