Christopher Logue, who died in 2011, but had been afflicted by dementia since 2005, was a British journalist and poet. He was closely involved with the founding of the satirical weekly Private Eye (still going strong), and was the first poet to issue his poems on posters, subsequently fly-posted around the city.
In the second half of his life, however, he became more classically inclined, and he began to issue poems based on Homer’s Iliad under the general title War Music. The plan was eventually to cover the whole poem, but Logue never lived to complete it. So what we have now is all his work on the project collected into one volume — the completed parts, some additional fragments, and his notes. Incomplete as it is, War Music has been widely hailed as among the 20th century’s greatest verse epics.
What’s it like? Well, the first thing to say is that it isn’t a straightforward translation. Logue couldn’t read classical Greek, but then nor could Keats. Then there are references to modern wars, and a great deal of slang and colloquial speech not normally associated with Homeric heroes. But it’s gripping from the very start, and never lets up. Its hallmarks are indeed its verbal intensity and its pervasive violence. Logue, who’d been in World War II, was a committed pacifist, and, like all wars, this one is no laughing matter.
This, in other words, is a rough and ready version, though apparently endlessly polished and revised. It’s paint thrown at a canvas rather than meticulously applied. The result is hyper-real, combining extreme savagery of battle with giggling gods awaiting their next offering of a thousand slaughtered oxen.
As for colloquialisms, you have phrases like “Not as per usual”, “Hold on,” and (referring to Diomed, a Greek warrior) “Not your day, Dio, not your day.” There are references to “quadrophonic ox-horns”, “blood like a car-wash” and “power-station outflow cables,” and there’s a character called Bubblegum.
Someone else has had 50 stitches on his face and now has a scar you could “strike a match on.” Achilles has redcurrant-colored hair, Hector is 267cm tall and Agamemnon says “Never forget that we are born to kill.”
Slightly more soberly, someone’s breasts were so lovely they envied each other, arrows pass “close as a layer of paint,” the dead when you tread on them “sigh and ooze like moss,” something happens “as fast as a viper over bathroom tiles” and you spurn vampires with garlic, but “ignorance with thought.”
And then there are the gods. They speak in terms like these: “Darling daddy, here we are.” “How do I look?” “Who cares a toss?” “They put it out in color. Right?” “Try not to play the thankless bitch,” and “I had her half an hour before she reached the altar rails. Quite a day.” The goddess Aphrodite wears snakeskin flip-flops, and others use wrinkle cream.
As for modern references, you have Okinawa, Stalingrad, Iwo Jima, dry ice, nectarine jelly, binoculars, “300,000 tons of aircraft carrier” and things as numerous as “microphones on politicians’ stands.”
How much did Logue complete? The story of the Iliad is, very briefly, that Achilles argues with the Greek leader, Agamemnon, over access to a war-bride and refuses to carry on fighting. He only relents when his comrade Patroclus is killed. Then he goes out and kills Hector, Troy’s top warrior and King Priam’s son, and drags his body through the dirt round the city walls. Priam comes to Achilles and begs for his son’s body, which Achilles gives him. Interestingly, the story of the wooden horse doesn’t appear in the Iliad.
This incomplete version gets as far as Achilles setting out to fight Hector (Book 19 out of a total in Homer of 24). But there are also disjointed fragments clearly intended for later inclusion in the main work, including Priam’s entreaty for Hector’s body. The editor, Christopher Reid, has made some tentative adjustments based on Logue’s manuscripts — often full of revisions, and clearly not the final versions — but has refused to create himself where Logue has left his work unfinished. This, in other words, is no Turandot, Puccini’s final and unfinished opera which was completed by a fellow composer, Franco Alfano.
The appeal of this magnificent work is its combination of quirky and seemingly irreverent material with one of the greatest poems in the European tradition. This could be seen as undermining it, even polluting it in some way. But almost all critics have instead praised Logue’s achievement, relishing the freshness the unconventional matter gives to the old original, but also aware that what Logue is doing at a deeper level is linking this greatest of war epics to all war.
War Music repays repeated readings. Bits of it would read well as poster poems, but the whole has a cumulative consistency that’s increasingly impressive the more it’s experienced.
There’s only one thing missing from Logue’s brilliant work, and that’s the lyric mode (verse appropriate for songs). You wouldn’t expect this in an epic, but it’s nonetheless worth noting that some of the finest examples of the lyric I’ve ever encountered remain unpublished. Here are some examples:
What is love but a shoe of dream,
None can really wear it.
Cinderella never lived a queen,
But died with her pretty feet bare.
And this:
I can’t see you through a telescope
Closer than you are;
I can’t seal you in an envelope
And post you from my heart.
Or this:
Oh the child, oh the child,
Such a bright and tender leaf,
We will press to flat distortion
In the books of our belief
For more information search the Internet for Terence J. Roe.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located