All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten

"Logue's Homer is less a translation than a channeling....Logue strikes a terrific balance between poetic elevation and abject stupidity, conveying at once the terrible power and terrible banality of violence..." Publishers Weekly

"[B]ring[s] the ethos of Homer to life...with a vigor and immediacy that surpasses every available modern translation. Logue's Homer satisfies the first requirement of a classic: It is a work completely unlike any that came before it." Jamie James, The Los Angeles Times

"[T]his version of the first skirmishes in the Iliad has the immediacy of an embed's dispatches....[Logue's] verse displays a gift for the unexpected simile....The music in the latest installment is wild and improvisational..." The New Yorker

"No classical scholar, no critic, has voiced more concisely the lasting impact of Homer." George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement (London)

The fourth book in Christopher Logue's translation of Homer's Iliad.

"Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly, "

"Emptying her blood-red mouth--set in her ice-white face--"

"Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked: "

""Kill! Kill for me!"

"Better to die than live without killing!""

"Who says prayer does no good?"

Christopher Logue's work in progress, his Iliad, has been called "the best translation of Homer since Pope's" ("The New York Review of Books"). Here in "All Day Permanent Red "is doomed Hector, the lion, "slam-scattering the herd" at the height of his powers. Here is the Greek army rising with a sound like a "sky-wide Venetian blind." Here is an arrow's tunnel, "the width of a lipstick," through a neck. Like Homer himself, Logue is quick to mix the ancient and the new, because his Troy exists outside time, and no translator has a more Homeric interest in the truth of battle, or in the absurdity and sublimity of war.

"Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly, "

"Emptying her blood-red mouth--set in her ice-white face--"

"Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked: "

""Kill! Kill for me!"

"Better to die than live without killing!""

"Who says prayer does no good?"

Christopher Logue's work in progress, his Iliad, has been called "the best translation of Homer since Pope's" ("The New York Review of Books"). Here in "All Day Permanent Red "is doomed Hector, the lion, "slam-scattering the herd" at the height of his powers. Here is the Greek army rising with a sound like a "sky-wide Venetian blind." Here is an arrow's tunnel, "the width of a lipstick," through a neck. Like Homer himself, Logue is quick to mix the ancient and the new, because his Troy exists outside time, and no translator has a more Homeric interest in the truth of battle, or in the absurdity and sublimity of war.