Translating Homer #2: Christopher Logue’s War Music
British Poet Christopher Logue
Following on from my previous post regarding Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, I would like to turn to a translation of Homer that is diametrically opposed to Wilson’s: Christopher Logue’s War Music, which is an “account” of Homer’s Iliad. Logue was an interesting character. He enlisted in the Black Watch and was stationed in Palestine during WWII, but was imprisoned in 1945 for stealing. Later, he became very involved in various pacifist movements in Britain and produced some poetry and plays of note. His unfinished magnum opus, however, was his retelling of Homer’s Iliad, which would be posthumously published as War Music. Logue, unlike Wilson or Fagles, had life experience outside of the academy and his retelling of the Iliad had the heart that is so often absent in other translations.
One thing I feel like I need to make clear: Wilson’s or Fagles’ translations aren’t bad. If you cannot read Homeric Greek and you want to get as close to the original as you can, like an asymtote, then these translations are as close as you’ll get. For that reason, they’re commendable. But the Homer you read in Wilson or Fagles is not the Homer you can read in the original Homeric Greek.
I had a Greek professor in college who liked to say, “Translation trims the juicy fat out of the original language.” What she meant was, when we translate anything from a foreign language to our own, it loses something: that juicy thing that tastes so succulent when we read the original but doesn’t seem to make its way over when we produce a translation. This is the fatal problem academic translations suffer from. By trying to follow closely Homer, the academic translations become fatless, iambic pentameter or no. But for much of the 20th and 21st Centuries, this has been how classicists have been taught to translate (and other translators, as well).
Compare then, Logue’s account of the Iliad. Wilson may claim she uses modern idiom, but Logue goes a step further and brings his Iliad fully into the 20th Century. Can we imagine this passage in an academic translation?
Low on the hillsides to the east of Troy,
Women, waist-deep in dusk, shoulder their baskets,
And, ascending, see the Wall’s dark edge
Level the slopes it covers; and above, riding a lake of tiles,
The Temple on the sunset-lit Acropolis
Whose columns stripe the arrowhead
The rivers Symois and Scamander make
As they meet, whose point flows out, flows on, until,
Imagined more than seen,
King Agamemnon’s army stands
(As in the sepias of Gallipoli)
Thigh-deep, chest-deep,
Out from the spits where buffalo graze,
Heaping the ocean’s ember blue
Over their curls, over their shoulders, as they pray:
“Dear Lord of Light, reclaim your mice.”
I can assure you this passage, in no form, can be found in Homer’s Greek. But I would contend that this passage is rich with delicious fat to chew on, and paints an amazing picture of the scene surrounding Troy at the beginning of the story. Homer the poet, I believe, would be smiling with delight at this passage compared to the sterile word-for-word translations of academics.
Because here’s the in-joke behind every translation that even Wilson acknowledges in her Translator’s Note (TN): “My translation is, like all translations, an entirely different text from the original poem. Translation always, necessarily, involves interpretation; there is no such thing as a translation that provides anything like a transparent window through which a reader can see the original.” Unfortunately, Wilson continues with a few sentences that I cannot seem to parse or determine its relevancy: “The gendered metaphor of the ‘faithful’ translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original, acquires a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman of the Odyssey, a poem that is deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance.” Wilson’s concerns, at least judging by her TN, are almost exclusively extra-poetical. Modern translations are an exercise in hewing close to the original while signaling certain academy-friendly virtues; if some poetry pops out at the end of that exercise then it’s a happy accident.
Logue, however, used the Iliad as a prism through which he could shine his own experiences and convey a pathos that is unmatched in an academic translation. Take another passage, as Homeric as anything found in the original Greek:
Swooping towards Alastor in his car,
As angels in commemorative stone
Still swoop on unknown soldiers as they die
For some at best but half-remembered cause.
And as Alastor swerved, Gray’s axe
Enhanced the natural crackage of his skull,
And he quit being, while his pair
Skid-slithered through the tumult, flailed that mass,
Then overran Patrolcus’ tattered corpse
Driving great Ajax off.
The last point I would like to make returns to the issue of the Translator’s Notes. It may be because Logue died before he could complete War Music, but there is no Translator’s Note in that book. While it is possible his publisher would have made him write one had he lived, War Music, on its own, comes to the reader well-versed in the Iliad as something strange but intimately familiar, pushing at the reader’s boundaries and expectations by bringing to bear all of English’s poetical possibilities and Logue’s experiences, instead of hamstringing itself by its fidelity to “the original Greek,” which every translator acknowledges is a losing battle anyway.
I can imagine Homer, whose descriptions of wounds and warfare has made some scholars convinced he was once a soldier, getting drunk in heaven’s bar with Pope, Chapman, and Logue, delighting in each other’s works and whatever else friends talk of in bars after the fourth beer. Then, in come the stolid academics, who have analyzed and explicated every word of the bard’s poem, and Homer getting a little self-conscious in the way everyone does when the teacher comes into the room. “Homer!” the academics shout across the bar. “Homer, we’ve waited our whole lives to ask you. This noun here, it’s been under debate for three centuries. Is it a partitive genitive or the object of a transitive verb?” And Homer, sweating, not sure he remembers what a partitive genitive is, replies, “I don’t know it just sounded beautiful and needed to be in that spot.”