All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten [Paperback]

Christopher Logue (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 23, 2004

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 The New Yorker

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 © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

“No classical scholar, no critic, has voiced more concisely the lasting impact of Homer.” —George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (June 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374529299
• ISBN-13: 978-0374529291
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #788,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Astounding July 15, 2004

By Richard Wells

Christopher Logue has a lot of guts. He's gotten into the ring with the likes of Fagles, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Pope, and most courageously, Homer himself - and acquitted himself well. Mr. Logue has pulled "The Iliad," into the 21st Century with less a translation than a re-write. It appears there are numerous volumes containing sections of Mr. Logue's work, and it's a little hard to keep track, but two editions offered on Amazon.com's website, "War Music," and the wondrously titled, "All Day Permanent Red," seem to contain it all.

Mr. Logue writes in a robust verse form that retains the epic language while exploring possibilities for a cinematic look on scenes and situations, as well as opening the field to modern metaphor. Unlike Barry Unsworth's interpolations in "The Songs of the Kings," Mr. Logue's don't jar, but rather deepen, and lift the story from some mythical past to something that is played out continually. A great device considering "The Iliad" is arguably the blue-print for every war story ever written.

I think "All Day Permanent Red" would work for readers with no pre-knowledge of the source, and though I've been through at least three previous translations it certainly worked for me.

Five Stars!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars And The Greatness Contnues December 7, 2005

By The Chalcenteric Kid

First "War Music", then "Kings" followed by "The Husbands" and now "All Day Permanent Red". Christopher Logue continues to dazzle and thrill with his books based on Homer's Iliad. It's the wonderful juxtaposition of classical images and modern day description that just works. It works when by all accounts all you should have is a hopeless mess. I can't rationally analyze why, but for me the poems operate on a almost physical level. I can feel that sun in the azure sky, so bright it hurts BEHIND your eyes, I can hear the crack of the oiled leather tack on foam-mouthed horses rolling their eye whites to Olympus, I can hear the flight of whispered arrows and I'm dazzled by the Sun God reflecting past glories off burnished armor.

What an achievement. And now there's a new volume to read, "Homer's Cold Calls" which is proving very difficult to find here in the USA and I will be having a buddy buy for me in the UK.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great idea, but I'm not sure he's pulling it off too well. May 30, 2008

By Robert P. Beveridge HALL OF FAMEVINE™ VOICE

Christopher Logue, All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003)

All Day Permanent Red isn't a bad book, really; the gimmick everyone's been raving about, Logue's meshing of the story of The Iliad with modern idiom, works surprisingly well:

"Think of the moment when far from the land
Molested by a mile-a-minute wind
The ocean starts to roll, then rear, then roar
Over itself in rank on rank of waves
Their sides so steep their smoky crests so high
300,000 plunging tons of aircraft carrier
Dare not sport its beam.
But Troy, afraid, yet more afraid
Lest any lord of theirs should notice any one of them
Flinching behind his mask
Has no alternative."
(37)

The problem here is that Logue hasn't transplanted enough of the actual Iliad for anyone who isn't already intimately familiar with Homer's original to get terribly much out of it. I wouldn't recommend it until you've at least read the original; perhaps, as Logue publishes more books in the series, it'll get fleshed out enough to be able to be approached by the Homer novice, but it is not yet to that point by any means. ***