For the past 44 years, a British poet named Christopher Logue has been engaged in one of the most peculiar and quixotic literary projects of our times. He has been rendering Homer's Iliad into English, issuing his efforts in a series of slim volumes, each representing two or three books of the original epic. In the process, he has modernized it without compunction, bringing to bear all the techniques of contemporary poetry—mixed line-length, tricks with typeface, fragmentation, allusions to the literature of the last century or so; and the kicker is: Logue can't read Ancient Greek, not a word of it. He fashions his Iliad by consulting pre-existing translations, getting a sense of what the thing is about, and then setting off to write his own version—inventing new episodes, ignoring others, renaming characters, and occasionally drifting off into a narrative entirely of his own making.