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

by Christopher Logue

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374529291
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/23/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.15(d)

About the Author

Christopher Logue is a screenwriter, a film actor, and the author of several books of poems. He lives in London, England.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

Set at no particular time and incorporating references to 2,000-plus years of Western history, this is the fourth installment from British poet and playwright Logue of his version of The Iliad (the significantly, even gratuitously, more violent of Homer's two epics). Logue began the series in the 1960s and last added to it with The Husbands in 1995. Like Anne Carson's updatings of myth, Logue's Homer is less a translation than a channeling, articulating its essences through terms like "a tunnel the width of a lipstick," "blood like a car wash" and "teenaged Athena." Logue (Prince Charming: A Memoir) strikes a terrific balance between poetic elevation and abject stupidity, conveying at once the terrible power and terrible banality of violence: "`There's Bubblegum!' `He's out to make his name!'/ `He's charging us!' `He's prancing!' `Get that leap!'/ THOCK! THOCK!" This book's brilliant cover montage somehow makes three framed shots of the back of a police van spell out "Spoils" and "Polis"-an excellent introduction to the mordant puns and rapid-fire sonic play to be found within. (Apr. 15) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly