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.





Christopher Logue has had an extraordinary and varied career. After turbulent schooldays he was court-martialled out of the army for illegally being in possession of Pay books, and spent two years in a boot camp--except this was no ordinary boot-camp, but the Crusader castle of Acre. He sat in a dungeon and read Shakespeare. Later he lived in Paris and wrote pornography for a while, including such unforgettable works as Lust--which he doesn't recommend. Later still he was imprisoned again for his involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and joined Private Eye producing the True Stories and Pseud's Corner columns for decades. His most important achievements have always been in poetry, though: his own work, and his brilliant, universally acclaimed translations of Homer. Logue is so honest, so hard on himself and his (admittedly plentiful) faults, that it can sometimes make you wince. But the honesty is also what makes this a brilliant self-portrait of a man at odds with the world, a natural drifter and bohemian, somehow contriving to survive in a difficult age, and produce some magnificent poetry along the way. --Christopher Hart