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

Christopher Logue (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374102953 | ISBN-13: 978-0374102951 | Publication Date: April 15, 2003 | Edition: 1st

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Booklist

"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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 64 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374102953
• ISBN-13: 978-0374102951
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,218,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant!, April 7, 2003

By 

Steven Martinovich (Sudbury, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All Day Permanent Red: An Account of the First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad (Hardcover)

I've always been wary of people "reimaging" -- to use Hollywood's latest buzzword -- the classics but it's next to impossible to condemn Christopher Logue's work in reinterpreting Homer's Illiad. In All Day Permanent Red, Logue rewrites the first battles in the Illiad and the result is a fantastic updating of books 5 and 6. Mixing ancient and modern metaphors in his poetry, Logue brings home the juxtaposition in war both as horror and joy. I'm a traditionalist, I don't much care for people messing about with the books I love, but I have nothing but applause for Logue.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Logue Iliad continues, July 18, 2003

By 

Joe Kenney "buttergun" (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All Day Permanent Red: An Account of the First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad (Hardcover)

British poet Christopher Logue continues his decades-long rewriting of Homer's tale of war with this slim volume, which comprises books five and six of the Iliad. Since these books feature the first battles in the Iliad, this book is action-packed from first page to last. An online reviewer compared this book to the first twenty minutes of "Saving Private Ryan," and that's a very apt comparison. Like those twenty minutes of film, the fifty pages that make up All Day Permanent Red are a hectic, heart-pounding melee of bloodshed.

More importantly, this book marks the first appearance in action of my favorite character in the Iliad, Diomedes. Though here he is called Diomed, or the Child, as Logue occasionally refers to him. Diomedes is like a replacement Achilles; while that famous hero sulks in his ship, Diomedes takes up the mantle of "wartime hero" and destroys every Trojan in his path. Logue's handling of the character is excellent, especially in the way he is introduced. As Odysseus witnesses his Achaean fellows being slaughtered on the battlefield, he prays to the god Athena for help. What follows is the best line in the book:

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?

As you can see from this quote, Logue's is not a standard translation of the Iliad. As any reader of his earlier collection "War Music" knows, Logue re-writes and changes the Iliad to suit his tastes. In fact, the man can't even read Greek. But his version of the book is adored by Homer-ophiles. If you asked me, I'd rather read Logue's cinematic bursts of action-packed, freestyle verse over any of the more noted, straight-up translators, such as Fagles, Lattimore, and Fitzgerald.

This book is highly recommended to anyone who's read the Iliad, and wants to see a master writer at work. The only problem is that it's so short, and I fear that Logue won't be able to finish the whole of the Iliad itself. We can only hope.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stunning and Eye-Opening, January 26, 2004

By 

J. E. Friedman (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All Day Permanent Red: An Account of the First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad (Hardcover)

I don't typically enjoy poetry. Maybe I'm too simple, but I usually need at least a modicum of a storyline and decent characterization in my literature. And most poetry I remember from school didn't have those aspects. Sure, lots of imagery and allusion, but not much on the storytelling.

That said, I was absolutely blown away by Logue's version of the Iliad. As another reviewer suggested, reimagining great works has a dubious past, but Logue is such a tremendous stylist his interpretation succeeds on every level. He maintains the emotion and power of the original, and he maintains plotline that has enthralled for thousands of years. But at the same time his English brings Homer directly to contemporary readers. For such a slim volume, it generated a lot of enjoyment.

My biggest disappointment is that so many of Logue's chapters of the Iliad are out-of-paint.