Christopher Logue, Alexander Pope, and the Making of War Music. (27th June 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Power, Henry
• Is Part Of: Review of English studies. Volume 69:Number 291(2018)
• Page Start: 747
• Page End: 766
• Publication Date: 2018-06-27
• Subjects: English literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; English philology -- Periodicals; 820.90005
• DOI: 10.1093/res/hgy039
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0034-6551

Abstract

Abstract: Between 1959 and 2011, the English poet Christopher Logue published a series of poems based on Homer's Iliad, to which he eventually gave the collective title War Music . These are radical recastings of Homer's epic (Logue resisted the term 'translation' and referred to them as 'accounts') and they seem at first sight to constitute a violent rejection of an earlier tradition of translation. One especially unusual aspect of Logue's creative process was the way he pieced War Music together from a wide variety of sources, often physically incorporating fragments of earlier texts into his manuscript. This essay offers a sketch of Logue's working methods, drawing on unpublished archival materials in order to stress the diversity of his sources (which encompassed both canonical literary texts and printed ephemera). I argue that one major influence on Logue's approach to translation was the example of Alexander Pope, whose translation of the Iliad (1715–20) Logue knew intimately; Pope, like Logue, incorporated fragments of earlier literature into his translation. Having established the similarity in their working methods, I show (by reference to Logue's annotated copy of Pope's Iliad ) that Logue was acutely aware of Pope's particular approach to translation.