All Day Permanent Red: An Account of the First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad - Hardcover

Logue, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374102953 ISBN 13: 9780374102951

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

Synopsis

The first clash of the armies in Logue’s “Heroic . . . brilliant” version of Homer’s Iliad (The New York Times Book Review)


Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly,
Emptying her blood-red mouth—set in her ice-white face—
Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:

“Kill! Kill for me!
Better to die than live without killing!”

Who says prayer does no good?

Christopher Logue’s work in progress, his Iliad, has been called “the best translation of Homer since Pope’s” (The New York Review of Books). Here in All Day Permanent Red is doomed Hector, the lion, “slam-scattering the herd” at the height of his powers. Here is the Greek army rising with a sound like a “sky-wide Venetian blind.” Here is an arrow’s tunnel, “the width of a lipstick,” through a neck. Like Homer himself, Logue is quick to mix the ancient and the new, because his Troy exists outside time, and no translator has a more Homeric interest in the truth of battle, or in the absurdity and sublimity of war.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Logue is a screenwriter, a film actor, and the author of several books of poems. He lives in London, England.

Reviews

Set at no particular time and incorporating references to 2,000-plus years of Western history, this is the fourth installment from British poet and playwright Logue of his version of The Iliad (the significantly, even gratuitously, more violent of Homer's two epics). Logue began the series in the 1960s and last added to it with The Husbands in 1995. Like Anne Carson's updatings of myth, Logue's Homer is less a translation than a channeling, articulating its essences through terms like "a tunnel the width of a lipstick," "blood like a car wash" and "teenaged Athena." Logue (Prince Charming: A Memoir) strikes a terrific balance between poetic elevation and abject stupidity, conveying at once the terrible power and terrible banality of violence: "`There's Bubblegum!' `He's out to make his name!'/ `He's charging us!' `He's prancing!' `Get that leap!'/ THOCK! THOCK!" This book's brilliant cover montage somehow makes three framed shots of the back of a police van spell out "Spoils" and "Polis"-an excellent introduction to the mordant puns and rapid-fire sonic play to be found within.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Logue's Homer," as it is called in England, has been an ongoing literary project since the 1960s. More than a translator, the poet reimagines the various books of The Iliad, inventing new scenes and infusing the whole with a modern tone and voice. This volume, the fourth excerpt from the work-in-progress to appear in the U.S., tackles the first battle scenes in Homer's poem, most of which occur in books five and six. In muscular, freewheeling lines that flash across the battlefield with the sweep of a film director's camera, Logue jumps between wide-angle shots of the strip of land, 30 yards wide, on which the battle is contested, and close-ups of the combatants: Diomedes "S-curving" through the Trojans, or Palt, one of Diomedes' victims, "holding the slick blue-greenish loops of his intestines." We see the horror of war, but we also feel, just as vividly and appallingly, the "unpremeditated joy" of it: "The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip / Happy in danger in a dangerous place." The contemporary references may offend purists, but they help drive home the universality of Homer's vision, jarring us at first and then seeming exactly right. Logue's Homer is both a marvelous tribute and a work of prodigious originality. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374102953
• ISBN 13: 9780374102951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64