Christopher Logue, 1926 - 2011

Christopher Logue, the British poet best known for his modernist re-working of Homer's Illiad, died at home in London on December 2nd. He was 85.

Logue grew up in Portsmouth, Hampshire. After a stint in the military, where he served as a soldier in the Black Watch and spent 16 months in an army prison, he turned to a variety of jobs to support his poetry. His Illiad project unfolded over 45 years, during which time he also wrote screenplays, contributed to Private Eye magazine, translated Brecht, and penned a pornographic novel under the name Count Palmiro Vicarion. But as a recent obituary in The Guardian notes:

It was the radio producer Donald Carne-Ross's invitation to reimagine The Iliad for BBC radio that set Logue on the journey of creativity that was to be his principal legacy. Carne-Ross dismissed his lack of Greek as no hindrance to the task, and Logue set about using existingtranslations – or "cribs" as he called them – from Alexander Pope, George Chapman and others, as well as literal versions from Carne-Ross himself.

[...]

His achievement was to invigorate the dramatic storytelling voice in the ancient work. This he did in a contemporary style that is at times cinematic. For instance, at one point he shifts scene with a simple line: "Cut to the fleet."

Modern pop-cultural references pervade it: All Day Permanent Red was a catchline for a lipstick advert. The violence is visceral, almost pornographic, in detail and has all the drama of an eyewitness account true in spirit to Homer's original:

As he fell back, back arched,
God blew the javelin straight; and thus
Mid-air, the cold bronze apex sank
Between his teeth and tongue, parted his brain,
Pressed on, and stapled him against the upturned hull

Logue was a sort of magpie of poetry – there are sections lifted from Brecht and others, and he rewrote existing reports of violence into his descriptions. "I'm fickle," he said in an Observer interview in 2006. "Almost everything I do is based on other texts. Without plagiarism, there would be no literature. I'm a rewrite man. A complete rewrite man, like our Willy Shakespeare."

Poet Louis MacNeice praised Logue's "re-write," saying that "never was blood bloodier or fate more fatal." Read Logue's entire obituary in The Guardian.