War music
by Christopher Logue · first published 1981
67% recommend33% neutral
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One of my literary touchstones is "War Music", a re-telling or re-imagining of the Iliad by the British poet Christopher Logue. I've read a couple of translations, but this is the one that really set my head alight because he takes liberties with…
on “The extraordinary influence of the Iliad and Odyssey” ↗Christopher Logue's War Music http://www.amazon.com/War-Music-Account-Books-Homers/dp/0226... It's the beginnings of a modern retelling of Homer's Iliad. If you like it there are two other short books (All Day Permanent Red and Homer…
on “Ask HN: Interesting (Non software) books?” ↗…found really compelling: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/4/24/21233353/madeline-mil... Wilson's book is next in my pile! If you're interested in enjoyable translations of Homer, I'd strongly recommend War Music by the British poet Chrisopher Logue. It's The Iliad, but he called it something like "a retelling" rather than "a translation" because it gave him more leeway. Unfortunately he died before he could finish…
on “The Odyssey – Alexander Pope translation (1725)” ↗For anyone who wants a "retelling" of the Iliad rather than a translation, I can't recommend highly enough War Music by the British poet Christopher Logue. It made me fall back in love with the classics. (I also read the Fagles and Wilson translations, both of which I enjoyed for different reasons). You can get a sense…
on “The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Samuel Butler” ↗…reader of the classics but his version really opened my mind to those worlds. I enjoy writers like Samuel Beckett and the weirder, darker end of sci-fi/fantasy (e.g. B. Catling's The Voorh), and Logue's War Music really just seemed to fit right into my taste.
on “War Music: Homer and His Iliad” ↗War Music is the name of an incomplete modern translation of the Iliad by Christopher Logue. It is without doubt one of the best poetic works of the past 100 years. "Achilles saw his armour in that instant And…
on “War Music: Homer and His Iliad” ↗This is a great run-down and mirrors my experience of reading Fagles, Fitzgerald and Wilson. My favourite though is Christopher Logue's version of the Iliad called War Music - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Music_(poem). It was controversial because he didn't know ancient Greek and based his version on other translations, as well as taking liberties with the text and introducing…
on “Advice on Reading Homer in Translation” ↗Logue's War Music is easily the finest poetic work of the late 20th century, but it's not a full translation -- it only covers a few books, a fraction of the total Iliad -- and I think that it's better understood as a…
on “"English Translators of Homer": A Review” ↗I think the thing I love most about Logue's retelling is that when reading it I hear the voices so clearly. I often think it's a shame that nobody (as far as I know) has put on a play of War Music.
on “"English Translators of Homer": A Review” ↗…(1818/1831), https://frankendiff.com; and Tales of the Dead, by Mrs. Utterson (1813), https://archive.org/details/talesofdead00utte Just started Homer's Iliad (Fagles translation) and Christopher Logue's War Music (2015). Just finished re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1980). I think it holds up well. Last time I read it, I was much younger than Arthur Dent; now I'm much older.…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗> I stumbled upon War Music after discarding (almost) every other translation of the Iliad because the translators cleary didn't get it Homer's world is very alien to ours. I realized at one point, reading the Odyssey, that it…
on “What makes a translation great?” ↗