Logue's Homer Cold Calls : War Music Continued

by Christopher Logue

The scene is set for Cold Calls, the fifth and penultimate instalment of Logue's Homer, an ongoing project - a piece of performance-art for the page rather than the stage - which has taken several decades to unfold, and has been described as, 'Less a translation than an adaptation. Less an adaptation in fact, than an original poem of considerable power.' (Derek Mahon)

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Christopher Logue, CBE was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival. He also wrote for the theatre and cinema as well as acting in a number of films. His two screenplays are Savage Messiah and The End of Arthur's Marriage. He was also a long-term contributor to Private Eye magazine, as well as writing for the Merlin literary journal of Alexander Trocchi. He won the 2005 Whitbread Poetry Award for Cold Calls.

His early popularity was marked by the release of a loose adaptation of Pablo Neruda's "Twenty Love Poems", later released as an extended play recording, "Red Bird: Jazz and Poetry", backed by a Jazz group led by Tony Kinsey.

One of his poems, "Be Not Too Hard" was set to music by Donovan Leach, and made popular by Joan Baez, from her 1967 album "Joan". Donovan's version appeared in the film "Poor Cow"(1967).

His major poetical work was an ongoing project to render Homer's Iliad into a modernist idiom. This work is published in a number of small books, usually equating to two or three books of the original text. (The volume entitled Homer: War Music was shortlisted for the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize.) He also published an autobiography called Prince Charming (1999).

His lines tend to be short, pithy and frequently political, as in Song of Autobiography:

"I, Christopher Logue, was baptized the year
Many thousands of Englishmen
Fists clenched, their bellies empty,
Walked day and night on the capital city."

He wrote the couplet that is sung at the beginning and end of the 1965 film A High Wind in Jamaica, the screenplay for Savage Messiah (1972), a television version of Antigone (1962), and a short play for the TV series The Wednesday Play titled The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965).

He also appeared in a number of films as an actor, most notably as Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils and as the spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam's 1977 film Jabberwocky.

Logue wrote for the Olympia Press under the pseudonym, Count Palmiro Vicarion, including a pornographic novel, Lust.

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source: wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Achilles in a sulk, the Greeks defeated

🛡️ A number of you are in the same book clubs for I keep seeing the same books pop over and over. One of them is Song of Achilles which I’m going to assume is a novel based mostly on the Iliad. Perhaps it takes you from his birth, his dipping in the river, to the fighting at Troy where he slays Hector and is later himself slain by Paris’s arrow to the heel.

This modern version of a portion of the Iliad is about a Greek defeat, where they are nearly annihilated, and certain Hector of Troy will fire their ships in the morning. The Greeks humbly approach Achilles in his tent and implore him to help. He will not. He is still sulking because the King, Agamemnon, took his bae (to use even more modern phraseology) for himself.

I think the poetry here (for in its original form the Iliad is poetry too) works well most of the time. In particular, in describing Achilles’s bitterness over the King’s actions. It certainly brings his words to life in a nice, tight English translation.

Logue published a number of different volumes in his contemporary retelling of the Iliad and I have most of them. I think All Day Permanent Red is the best one.

The story of Achilles and Hector and the Battle of Troy will always be with us.

[Kirsti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Logue was famous for introducing anachronisms into the Iliad, and this one starts with a character who "came to Troy in a taxi." But apparently there were taxis in the ancient world! Anyway, this is part of an audio version of War Music and other translations read by Simon Vance. I enjoyed Athena's description of Helen as "their champion she."

[Joyce]

The Iliad is like malaria for many of us (although far more pleasurable from what I understand). It sets the terms by which one can understand men and masculinity in a form that is remarkably unvarnished and yet highly polished. And of course part of the unending fun is noting its echoes in other works of art throughout the centuries, and having at least the odd chance of knowing what is going on in a painting of Nestor or a summer blockbuster movie about the Hulk.

Christopher Logue, roguishly eulogized as "Homer's rewrite man", worked on his version of the Iliad -- out of order, ahistorically cinematic, a pacifist's love-affair from afar -- from 1959 till his death aged 85 in 2011. This volume was the last to be published and covers some of the most vivid scenes of the epic, notably the wounding of Aphrodite by Diomedes and the embassy to Achilleus. Most importantly, this is the part where the various females start to openly bicker amongst themselves while Zeus tries to keep the peace... which Logue transforms into a trashy reality TV episode! Hera is the aging beauty, jealous of the younger and hotter Aphrodite, while Athena is portrayed as a goth teenager who loves violence ("better to die than to live without killing!") and sweets.

[Ann Klefstad · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK I can't review it because I haven't read it yet, I hadn't heard of it, but I'm ordering it tomorrow. Logue is, in some sense, Odysseus.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short read. A pity this is the last one in the series, as Logue passed away.
At this point (his 5th volume of these "rewrites") the cover declares "Logue's Homer"!
It may be a short volume, but reading it is well worth it for Logue's version of Nestor bringing Agamemnon's offer/bribe to Achilles in an effort to get him to fight the Trojans once again. Maybe the best section of Homer that Logue wrote. Flows very nicely, and really gets to Homer's point.

The first 3 volumes are under 1 cover, by FSG.
Sadly this is only a Brit PB it seems - but one of those nice Faber productions, with the fold under covers. I got mine at a "reasonable" $17 - but I see it is now up to $35 on Amazon, and a "new" copy is going for $437! (05/12/2021)

[Hari Z Hutahayan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phonetic narrative transcendence transition. Good praise is not enough for him.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

     The sea.
Their feet along the sand to Agamemnon's gate.
And in starlit air
The Trojans singing:

     "I love my wife, I love her dearly,
     I love the hole she pisses through,
     I love her lily-white tits
     And her nut-brown arsehole,
     I could eat her shit with a wooden spoon."

So ... that's how this book -- and, with it, Christopher Logue's astonishing, decades-long project to recast Homer as contemporary verse -- ends. Achilles has just refused Ajax and Nestor's plea to return to the fight, and the Trojans are encamped on the plain, ready to storm the Greek ships at dawn.

It's disappointing in a way, not least because Logue lived another six or seven years after finishing this book and never published another installment, even though all the blurbs promised he at work on one. Well, he's been dead four years now, and not a peep about a posthumous volume. Maybe he pulled a Virgil and left instructions for it to be destroyed because it was unfinished. So my fingers are crossed, but I'm not holding my breath.

My enthusiasm for Logue's previous volume, All Day Permanent Red, has been duly recorded. Cold Calls, though, even though it picks up right where Red left off, is an entirely different poem on a very different register. Where one could delight in Red's bloody awesomeness, this next book -- written, of course, as Britain obediently followed America into the Iraqi desert -- is unmistakably anti-war. We get this several pages in, after a character named Nyro ("handsomest of all the Greeks save A.") is decapitated by Aeneas ("Took his head off his spine with a backhand slice -- Beautiful stuff ...") and his head is mounted on a pike. All bloody well and good. Then we get:

     When Nyro's mother heard of this
She shaved her head; she tore her frock; she went outside
Ripping her fingernails through her cheeks:
Then down her neck; her chest; her breasts;
And bleeding to her waist ran round the shops,
Sobbing:
     "God, kill Troy.
Console me with its death.
Revenge is all I have.
My boy was kind. He had his life to live.
I will not have the chance to dance in Hector's blood,
But let me hear some have before I die."

     "I saw her running around.
     I took the photograph.
     It summed the situation up.
     He was her son.
     They put it out in colour. Right?
     My picture went around the world."

I know Christopher Logue isn't the first guy to make the point that war is the same today as 3,000 years ago, but hell, this works for me.

At the same time, our image of the Olympian deities has degenerated to the point where they now behave like characters in one of the trashier reality programs. Here is Aphrodite ("god of tops and thongs") speaking to Zeus during one of the family squabbles:

     "Stuff Greece," Love said.
"Your blubber-bummed wife with her gobstopper nipples
Hates Troy because Troy's Paris put her last
When we stripped off for him.
     As for the Ithacan boat-boy's undercurved preceptatrix,
She hates Troy because my statue stands on its acropolis."

As I said, this book is apparently how Logue's Homer project ended. Its main disappointment, for me, is that it leaves me wanting more. It's not that I expected Logue to "translate" the entire epic; it just would have been nice to have it end on a more definitive note. Logue's poetry satisfies a thirst I didn't know I had for poetry like this: kinetic, headlong, throbbing with life and energy. I can't get enough.


N.B.: I read this poem not in the Faber edition -- only published in the U.K., though you can probably still order it over the Internet -- but in this volume of Poetry magazine, still on my shelves:
               
I had flipped through it when I first got it -- the first time I ever heard of Logue, probably -- but with little interest, not really knowing what the point was. So I'm glad I hung on to it. Going through it again made me a bit nostalgic for those days. The years from '03 to '05 or '06 were a mini golden age for that rich little magazine.

[Terence Hawkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this installment of his decades-long "account" of the Iliad Logue may have reached a tipping point. In his earlier works---"Kings"; "War Music"; "The Husbands"; "All Day Permanent Red"---modern metaphor is entirely effective. For example in "War Music" Menelaus' helmeted head scans the horizon like a radio telescope. Works for me. In this book Aphrodite wears gray silk lounge pajamas and snakeskin flipflops. Doesn't work for me. Especially when Aphrodite has been called "Goddess of Tops and Thongs." I'll read any further installment with pleasure---Logue's gifts are otherwise undiminished--- but I think he's gone a little too far out on the limb.

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, just brilliant! I love Christopher Logue's approach to his interpretation of Homer's The Iliad. These little volumes of poetry are well worth reading on an annual basis, and I'm saddened to to realize that Logue's poetic voice has been silenced upon his death in late-2011. I will always treasure my collection of his 'Iliad' poetry, including War Music, Cold Calls, and All Day Permanent Red.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

"His head was opened, egglike, at the back,
Mucked with thick blood, blood trickling from his mouth.
His last words were:
'My Prince, your trumpeter has lost his breath.'"

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hm. Didn't like this one as much as War Music. It came off as trying a bit too hard. But it could be because I am not familiar with the story.

[Tarragon Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This and the other volumes are perfect poetic narrative. An arrow pierces and mans throat like a lipstick.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

See War Music

[Mikael · Rating 5 out of 5]

like napalm death in verse

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the version in "Poetry." Excellent re-imagining of "The Iliad."