War Music

I happened to be chatting with a couple of friends recently about Homer's Iliad, after I was sent some links to a couple of interesting recent articles about the war epic by The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins; and I was reminded of the sequence of poetry collections based on this work by the great English eccentric Christopher Logue (who I remember fondly from my childhood as the long-time compiler of the Pseud's Corner feature in satirical magazine Private Eye, a bi-monthly anthology of the most amusingly inept, over-the-top, misguided or pretentious pronouncements in the review pages of the UK media). There are now several instalments of this project, which he has been working on intermittently for the past fifty years, and I'm not sure if they are all still in print. They're not 'translations' in the conventional sense: while he will sometimes follow the Homeric narrative structure quite closely, recreating particular incidents and metaphors immediately recognisable from the original, more often he will take a defiantly free-form approach, veering off on imaginative tangents of his own, and liberally seasoning his language with flagrant anachronisms (which at times, inevitably, will jar on the reader, but for the most part manage to convince you of their appositeness, are surprisingly successful). Logue, apparently, knows no Greek himself, and works essentially from existing English translations; although he has often consulted with Classical scholars on various points. Perhaps the best-known of these serial renderings of The Iliad is called War Music; this seems to have become a general, unifying title for the whole sequence. It was, I think, the first to be published (not until the late 80s, nearly thirty years after he'd first conceived of the idea - that should be some encouragement to writers struggling with long gestation periods for their masterworks!), and I remember loving it when I was a Classics student at university. I wonder if he yet regards the sequence as 'complete' (I don't think he was ever intending to reproduce the whole of The Iliad); since the great man is now into his 80s, I fear it is unlikely that we'll see any more of this from him.

Here is the opening of War Music:

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.

Now look along that beach, and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
And split by a double-doored gate;
Then through the gate a naked man
Whose beauty’s silent power stops your heart
Fast walk, face wet with tears, out past its guard
And having vanished from their sight
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other’s luminescent panes;
Then kneel amongst those panes, beggar his arms, and say:

“Source, hear my voice.
God is your friend. You had me to serve Him.
In turn, He swore: if I, your only child,
Chose to die young, by violence, far from home,
My standing would be first; be best;
The best of bests: here; and in perpetuity…”

And here's another wonderful snippet I discovered in an article by Jim Lewis on the Slate magazine website (this from the most recent [I think] addition to the cycle, All Day Permanent Red - the title an inspired piece of pop culture beachcombing: Logue stole this phrase from a Revlon lipstick advertisement!):

See an East African lion
Nose tip to tail tuft ten, eleven feet
Slouching towards you
Swaying its head from side to side
Doubling its pace, its gold-black mane
That stretches down its belly to its groin
Catching the sunlight as it hits
Twice its own length a beat, then leaps
Great forepaws high great claws disclosed
The scarlet insides of its mouth
Parting a roar as loud as sail-sized flames
And lands, slam-scattering the herd.

"This is how Hector came on us."

I was immediately regretful that I don't have access to Homer's original here with me to compare (although I suspect Logue has surpassed it). I was also reminded of Byron's "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold..." - but that, I think, is a topic for another day.

I leave you with this, the haunting opening of All Day Permanent Red:

Impacted battle. Dust above a herd.
Hands wielding broken spearpoles rise through the ice-hot twilight
flecked with points.
And where you end and where the dust begins
Or if it is the dust or men that move
And whether they are Greek or Trojan, well
Only this much is certain: when a lull comes – they do –
You hear the whole ridge coughing.

[I have only just learned that, in his younger days, the irrepressible Mr Logue wrote a pornographic novella called Lust (very difficult to find now), under the exuberant nom de plume Count Palmiro Vicarion. That may have set me off on a hunt for improbable or amusing pen-names for a future post.]