Christopher Logue died in 2011. War Music, his version of the Iliad, fragments of which were first published in the LRB, is published by Faber and is now available as an audiobook read by the author.
Now I shall ask you to imagine howMen under discipline of death prepare for war.There is much more to it than armament,And kicks from those who could not catch an hour’s sleepWaking the ones who dozed like rows of spoons;Or those with everything to lose, the kings, Asleep like pistols in red velvet. Moments like these absolve the needs dividing men.Whatever caught...
Sunset.
Greece to its ships to eat and sleep. But Achilles could not sleep Because he could not stop himself Thinking about Patroclus. How in this war or that They saved each other’s lives a dozen times a day, Or how rash words died in him at Patroclus’ glance. He tried this side, then that. Then he got up and went down to...
Two limestone plates support the Aegean world. The greater Anatolian still lies flat, But half an eon past, through silent eyes: ‘Ave!’ God watched the counterplate subside, until Only its top and mountain tops remained Above His brother, Lord Poseidon’s, sea:...
There’s a moment in this book – some time in the 1960s – when Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell have been asked to Hintlesham Hall in Suffolk to do a poetry reading. They...
I first came across Christopher Logue’s ‘account’ of the Iliad in 1975 at Oxford where I went to hear a vigorous reading by two young men of Patrocleia, his version of Book XVI....
At the end of Book Two of the Iliad, in the famous catalogue of the Greek and Trojan forces, the Carians, allies of Troy, led by their chief Nastes, are referred to as barbarophonoi, literally...
Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a...
What makes children laugh? First and foremost, disaster – other people’s disasters, naturally.
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