ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 28, 1996 TAG: 9601300049
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY MARGARET GRAYSON
THE HUSBANDS: An Account of Books 3 and 4 of Homer's Iliad. By Christopher Logue. Farrar Straus, Giroux. $19.
"The Husbands" is no translation but a retelling - brilliant, beautiful, learned, ribald, audacious and hilarious - of Homer's timeless epic. Zeus and Homer nod their thunderous assent and approval, and Mount Olympus shakes with laughter and applause.
Logue's account of the duel between the "husbands" - Menelaus, the Spartan King and Paris, the Trojan prince - for Helen of Troy and the prize of gold is pure poetry, pure pleasure.
Logue seems as comfortable with the epic conventions as Homer himself. His sure-footed, unstrained use of iambic pentameters is just as song worthy as Homer's stately dactylic hexameters. His epithets ring just as true: "Paramount Agamemnon," "creamy-armed Hera," and "teen-age! Athene." His redrawing of Homer's gods and heroes is equally compelling.
The intervention of the gods gives modern readers of the "Iliad" pause, but in Logue's hands, the immortals' mingling with men is as natural as it is delightful. As an example: Zeus has just told his brother, the sea-god Poseidon, that he will uphold the peace and truce resulting from the duel, when:
"Rubbish!" They hear, and looking around they see
(steadying her red-sepal hat with the russet-silk flutes)
creamy-armed Hera with teen-age Athene
(holding their scallop-edged parasol high)
as they wobble their way down the dunes.
Logue's similes include California earthquakes and the sound of Niagara at night. His lines echo Catullus, Jacques Brel, Chaucer, Chapman and Shakespeare. Noble Hector becomes Ek in the mouth of his brother, Paris, and twice, Helen is Elly, but it works. It all works to bring Homer's tale to life in terms as modern as today and as ancient as the Bronze Age.
For lovers of Homer, for lovers of poetry, for lovers of English literature, "The Husbands" is required reading.
Margaret Grayson teaches Latin at North Cross School.
LENGTH: Short : 47 linesby CNB