Christopher Logue has been a dealer in stolen property (briefly), a prisoner in a Crusader castle (16 months), a pornographer (the book Lust), and, probably no less discreditably, an actor, a poet, and a writer of screenplays. As if this weren’t enough, for over four decades this versatile Englishman has been engaged in a “reworking” of the Iliad. It is not, he is at pains to stress, a translation (he knows no Greek), but an episodic “account” of the ancient epic that has already taken far longer to produce than Troy took to fall.
And, as you read those words, I can hear you sigh. The prospect of yet another tawdry modernization of a classic that needs none seems like nothing to look forward to. Our age often shows itself too restless, unimaginative, and self-important to attempt a genuine understanding of our culture’s past. Hot in the pursuit of some imagined relevance, we are forever reinterpreting and updating, here The Tempest as an allegory of slavery, there a few nipples to spice up that boring old Jane Austen. And if, in the process, the sense of the original is lost, we shrug, and settle for what is left: deracinated pap, bland at best, topically—and inconsequentially— “controversial” at worst. Only later do we bother to wonder where our literature has disappeared to.
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