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Black Swan bookgasm review #1: War Music by Christopher Logue (1981)

This is the first in a series of random book reviews taken from my own hand written notes in my journal. Notes are re-edited to make it into a more coherent presentation with the hope others would read the book for themselves.

War Music by Christopher Logue (1981)

War Music by Christopher Logue comprises versions of Homer’s Iliad published over decades since 1981. It’s a modern, cinematic re-rendering of the Greek epic which manages to re-cast Homer’s battles for twentieth-century readers.

I first read parts of it when I went out on tour to Afghanistan as a combat helicopter pilot. It was a ragged dog eared copy given to me by one of my older siblings who had served in the armed forces with distinction and now he wanted me to have it since I was being deployed to Afghanistan.

In between down times between missions I would read it and just soak in its inventive use off language to tell a story birthed at the dawn of Western civilisation and teaching a lesson as old as civilisation itself: that all wars are the same wars.

The English poet Christopher Logue called himself a “Catholic atheist.” Were he religious, he said, he would look out for God in creation. “Did the ancient Greeks believe in their gods as I believe in the ancient Greeks?” he wondered. One of the Lasallian Brothers at his Catholic school in Southsea told him about the elaborate ornamentation hidden from view on cathedral roofs, “safe in the sight of God until Judgment Day.” This information convinced the young Logue to work from that day in the spirit of the medieval carvers: without justification. “That I did not know what I wanted to do was unimportant,” he wrote.

Logue, born in Portsmouth in 1926, described his father as “a devout Irish-English Catholic.” His paternal grandfather, a Catholic from Coleraine in Northern Ireland, spent twenty-two years in the British Army. His Irish aunt Margaret taught him to read and write. “Atheism?” she once admonished him. “There’s no such thing. A silly boast God finds no trouble in forgiving.” Logue never stopped believing in God, he said, because he had never started believing in Him. “I find the idea of a beginning as impossible to credit as that of an end.” His own atheism left him unimpressed. He preferred the company of people whom he knew to be religious.

Logue always envied people with a purpose. It was not until 1959, after a stint in a military brig and a period writing pornography in Paris, that he found his. In his early thirties and already feeling old, he was asked by the classicist Donald Carne-Ross, then working for the BBC, to adapt a passage from the Iliad for an English version he was broadcasting on the Third Programme. Doris Lessing, a close acquaintance, had told Logue that the Iliad, if not the task of its translation, suited him well: “Something to do with heroism, tragedy, that sort of thing.” But Logue found Homer boring. Carne-Ross proposed a section of Book XXI in which Achilles attacks the river Scamander, provided Logue with a prose crib and advised him to read published translations to get a sense of the story. “A translator must know one language well,” Carne-Ross told Logue. “Preferably his own.”

Carne-Ross also advised Logue to go away and “read translations by those who did. Follow the story.” Logue gave it a go, and the result sowed the seed of what was to blossom over the decades into the centrepiece of Logue’s working life; his ultimate creative endeavour.

For more than forty years the English poet Christopher Logue worked in fits and starts on his narrative poem War Music, subtitled An Account of Homer’s Iliad. The poem, which he was unable to complete before he died in 2011, was published in several sections titled War Music (1981), Kings (1991), The Husbands (1995), All Day Permanent Red (2003), and Cold Calls (2005), corresponding, respectively, to Books 16-19, 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, and 7-9 of The Iliad. These books were brought together in a single volume by Faber publishers that tells the story of Logue’s fragmentary and highly original Trojan War.

Clearly the poem cannot be read outside of its relation to The Iliad, but we also cannot call it a “translation” in the familiar sense. To do so would suggest that it belongs in the same category as works produced with an aim of comprehensive fidelity to the original’s language and structure, texts such as those by Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, and Stanley Lombardo.

Is War Music, then, a form of loose translation, a “carrying over” of spirit, with all the liberty that implies? Is Logue, as Gary Wills wrote, the third in an exclusive tradition of English poets, after George Chapman and Alexander Pope, “to bring Homer crashing into their own time”? I think so.

Logue drew inspiration from a vast range of sources. The lines with which Zeus surveys the Trojan plain after a day’s fighting have been taken directly from a New Yorker piece on the first Gulf War: “He looks/ Back to the Ridge that is, save for a million footprints,/ Empty now”. When Agamemnon shouts Achilles down, his words are half-borrowed from Milton’s Lycidas: “Blindmouth!/ Good words would rot your tongue”. Snippets of the venerable translations by Pope and Chapman pop up at unexpected moments, amid the ultra-violence of Logue’s battle scenes.

War Music is a translation that takes no prisoners. No line of Homer’s survives un-annealed by the application of English. Like Homer, Logue is absolutely unapologetic about the business of bloodletting. This attitude complements his insusceptibility to beauty. “In verse (as elsewhere) beauty will serve any view and give it a glamour,” he wrote, pondering the case of Ezra Pound. “We should not be afraid to call it whorish.” Logue takes courage in this matter from the example of the Iliad. “The Greeks are not humanistic, not Christian, not sentimental,” Xanthe Wakefield told him on the occasion of his first looking into Homer. “Please try to understand that. They are musical.” Logue sets himself the challenge of converting the sounds of slaughter into the chimes at midnight. This requires an acute sensitivity to fate untinged by timidity. In one of his working notes Logue reminds himself to supply, at a certain point in the poem, a simile for “how far courage can take you.” In truth his whole work stands as an extension of that simile, almost to its breaking point.

Logue’s retelling of the Iliad plays with the idea that, when it comes to war, any sort of ending is an illusion. His decision to illustrate Homer’s story of brave men and bickering gods with flagrantly anachronistic combat imagery (“whumping” helicopters; Uzis “shuddering warm against your hip”) makes the point that, when it comes to war, the best humanity has ever managed is the odd break between battles. This is certainly how I felt in my down time between missions. The whumping sound of the rotar blades throbbed in my ear as I got into the cockpit of my helicopter - many times it made me think of Logue’s haunting lines.

War Music is incomplete because the war isn’t over. “Someone”, the last line reads, “has left a spear stuck in the sand.” It’s an ideal outgoing image: still, striking, but throbbing with potential; gesturing to the wars to come. As I left Afghanistan I thought about my colonial ancestors who had sought adventure and high service in this beautiful barren land and that I was but a passing present incarnation and then the chilling sad thought struck me that I know I won’t be the last in the wars to come.

It is, of course, frustrating that War Music will never be complete but the collected edition one can buy now gives us a definitive text of one of the strangest and most thrilling English poems since the 20th Century. It also confirms that Logue’s Homer deserves a place alongside those of Chapman and Pope.

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This isn’t a blog about Lyme Disease.

Hi there - welcome to my first…blog? I'm not sure what you've stumbled upon either, but nevertheless, greetings. I suppose I should introduce myself first.

I'm a young woman residing on the upper east coast. Currently, trying to balance out my life; finishing my education (B.S in Business Marketing, B.A in Media Studes/Mass Communications with a graphic design minor), captaining my university's track and field team, fulfilling internship duties and a part time job. I'm busy - I like to be busy. In January (2017) I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease, through the IgM and IgG blood test. Unequivocally. At the doctor's appointment I just remember smiling? Odd. I had no idea what Lyme Disease meant for me, or for anyone. I suppose I had a case of one those moments where you're entirely and utterly overwhelmed with confusion so you just revert to some sort of expression that you think won't offend anyone. My mom and my doctor sort of just stared at me tentaively, I think they were waiting for me to explode. I didn't, then. I think in that moment I felt relief, or it came over me within the next few days. The diagnosis explained a lot of things for me; my body's allocating resources to fight off not only the Lyme, but the coninfections as well, this gives my body less time to focus on processing the overwhelming anxiety that it builds. Most days my brain feels like it's on fire, but I understand why now and that gives me great relief. The diagnosis explained that I wasn't any crazier...than usual :). My body just doesn't have enough reserves to handle everything. To this, I shrug. I've chosen to battle Lyme through Naturopathic medicine and a very restricted diet. That means I’m currently taking low dosage antibiotics, managing coinfections and boosting my immune system, while strictly adhering to the Low FOD diet. My doctor's not crazy about the idea that I'm continuing to run. But, I’m stubborn, have to for mental sanity :). And sometimes mental sanity is more important. Somedays, I feel ‘normal’. Somedays, I really, really don’t. I think I’m on a path that will tip the scale - I'm on the road to having more normal days. This isn't a blog about Lyme Disease. But, it is a part of my life. So it will be a part (and only a part) of this adventure. I've always been unable to define myself concisely, I hope that everyone finds those "describe yourself in 3 words" get to know you missions a very difficult joke. I'm a young girl who loves a lot of things; writing, running, photographing; I'm a sister, daughter, friend; I'm quiet, ambitious, headstrong (sometimes a bit too much). I'm a lot of things. We're all a lot of things. I'm battling Lyme, but my life is still happening. My joints hurt, my brain hurts - but I'm not putting life on hold. Neither should you. This is a space to synthesize thoughts, that I hope will help to serve me on my journey of healing. So welcome, I'd love it if you stayed too. Xo, K.

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