Christopher Logue, Alexander Pope, and the Making of War Music

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 This essay offers a sketch of Logue’s working methods, drawing on unpublished archival materials in order to stress the diversity of his sources (which encompassed both canonical literary texts and printed ephemera).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.