Christopher Logue and the Iliad

Abstract

Christopher Logue and the Iliad* CHARLES ROWAN BEYE Icame to the Greek text of the Iliad when I was in my late teens after an outing with Plato’s Apology and Homer’s Odyssey. I never looked back: ancient Greek literature became my undergraduate major, Homeric epic my graduate specialty, a narrative technique of the poet of the Iliad my dissertation topic. I had the singular pleasure of introducing students to the ancient Greek language for almost every one of the forty-two years that I taught. And in almost every one of those forty-two years I also taught them either an introduction to Homeric Greek using the Iliad as my text, or a course in Homeric epic in English translation, sometimes both when enthusiasm for classical antiquity reached a dramatic peak in the sixties. In the English language course, I used to fret over my choice of the translation of the text of the Iliad. Because I could read the poem in the Greek of Homer I was acutely sensitive to the intricate structure of the phraseology which formed the basis of the Homeric language. Nobody talked like Homer; the text of the Iliad and Odyssey is sui generis, a language created over centuries by professional singers of tales who composed, collaborated, transmitted over time and place, all manner of stories. Like hip-hop which nobody speaks, only far more intricate. Out of that there came down to us the Iliad and the Odyssey. This simple bald statement, like equally unequivocal statements about the nature of God, can set off the equivalent of religious wars among professional Homerists. So we shall *Christopher Logue, War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad, Christopher Reid, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 352 pages. arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 leave it. The point is that the language in which the Homeric texts are written, and probably originally sung, is a thing of intricate, exquisite, complex beauty, well worth the effort to learn, and laughably unlike anything to be found in the so called “translations” of Homer. That there are thousands of them—and more being turned out every day when the readership is dramatically, if not fatally, declining—is testament to what is instinct in anyone who becomes intimate with the Homeric language: dammit, I can turn this into something that will bring across the ancient Greek. It doesn’t happen, didn’t happen to Richmond Lattimore who so very carefully retained the repeated epithets, the repeated phraseology; he was the translator du jour of the 1950s, albeit for many readers the great classroom snooze. Robert Fitzgerald, the favorite of English professors in those days—his more cautious, his more “poetic,” effort certainly was not action-packed; and although things got better with Robert Fagles—nowadays the almost authorized text, if only because Bernard Knox’s introduction to it is like the Homeric seal of approval—reading page after page of those interminable battles is not pleasant. Recently, I introduced a small group of senior citizens to the Iliad in a refreshingly honest course where the students were not examined and had the option of reading the poem or a brief precis—nothing concentrates one’s attention like realizing your days are numbered. After a few weeks, one gentleman brought up the tedium of reading the Fagles translation in toto, pointing out that page after page produced such boredom as to be unendurable. “All too true,” I said, adding with the freedom and candor of someone retired from his job; “I just don’t think translations work.” Which brings me to Christopher Logue’s account of the Iliad. And behind him the miracle of his being prompted, quite unwillingly, into the whole enterprise. BBC producer D. S. Carne-Ross has gained his fifteen minutes of fame for convincing Logue to make an English language script for a BBC broadcast of Homer’s telling of the great scene when Achilles fights with the river god, Scamander. Logue’s hesitachristopher logue and the ILIAD 166 tion was because he read no Greek. The genius moment was when Carne-Ross said he would tell him the story line for line, word...