Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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. ***