Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the texts
- 1 Translation: Some Issues
- 2 Translating Homer: Some Issues
- 3 George Chapman's Translation: An Elizabethan Homer?
- 4 Alexander Pope's Translation: An Augustan Homer?
- 5 E. V. Rieu's Translation: A Modern Homer?
- 6 Christopher Logue's Translation: A Modernist Homer?
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
6 - Christopher Logue's Translation: A Modernist Homer?
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the texts
- 1 Translation: Some Issues
- 2 Translating Homer: Some Issues
- 3 George Chapman's Translation: An Elizabethan Homer?
- 4 Alexander Pope's Translation: An Augustan Homer?
- 5 E. V. Rieu's Translation: A Modern Homer?
- 6 Christopher Logue's Translation: A Modernist Homer?
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Contemporary translators of Homer now have little choice but to be conscious of the tradition of which they are seeking to become a part. Thus Christopher Logue writes in the Introduction to War Music (1981), one of his accounts of passages from Homer:
Either the translations of the Iliad on which War Music is based did not exist or they had had only a passing interest for me until 1959 when Donald Carne-Ross suggested I contribute to a new version of the poem he was about to commission for the BBC.
Knowing no Greek I began work on the passage he chose for me by studying the same passage in the translations published by Chapman (1611), Pope (1720), Lord Derby (1865), A. T. Murray (1924), and Rieu (1950).
What is as significant as the names which are in Logue's personal tradition are the names which are not. Logue has set himself firmly in a line of poet-translators. He is consciously rejecting an alternative line of scholar-translators, of whom the most current and important at the time he was writing were the Americans Richmond Lattimore (Iliad (1951), Odyssey (1965)) and Robert Fitzgerald (Odyssey (1961), Iliad (1974)). In an interview in the summer of 1993 he stated:
I look at new translations as they come out, that of Professors Knox and Fagles, for example, which is a touch sharper than Professor Lattimore's. However, these three professors may have been reading Homer all their lives, but he's failed to teach them what verse is. They do not write verse. They write blank-verse prose, sired by E. V. Rieu, via Lang, Leaf and Myers out of the King James Bible. It burbles along but it doesn't scan. Still, such things make a bomb for the publishers.
(Robert Fagles's version of the Iliad came out in 1990; his Odyssey in 1997.)
There is an implicit polarity, even animosity, here towards scholars and scholarship in the name of poetry; and this, too, is itself a feature of the tradition in which Logue is placing himself.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- English Translators of HomerFrom George Chapman to Christopher Logue, pp. 56 - 68Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1997