All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten
The mounting pressure of a city siege, two politician-generals invoking gods, the amount of dust in the Middle East—this version of the first skirmishes in the Iliad has the immediacy of an embed's dispatches. Logue, a veteran of the Second World War, has been freely translating Homer since 1959. His verse displays a gift for the unexpected simile—the sound of the Greek army getting to its feet is like "a raked sky-wide Venetian blind." The music in the latest installment is wild and improvisational: "That unpremeditated joy as you / —the Uzi shuddering warm against your hip / Happy in danger in a dangerous place / Yourself another self you found at Troy— / Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum!" But the final note is hushed, when, after the battle, we see the ridge overlooking the Trojan plain: "save for a million footprints, / Empty now."Copyright © 2005The New Yorker