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Sounding Out Homer: Christopher Logue's Acoustic Homer

2009; Center for Studies in Oral Tradition; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ort.0.0038

1542-4308

Emily Greenwood,

Lexicography and Language Studies

Sounding Out Homer:Christopher Logue's Acoustic Homer Emily Greenwood (bio) This article presents a case study on sound effects in Christopher Logue's adaptation of Homer's Iliad, a project that began when Logue adapted Achilles' fight with the river Scamander from book 21 of the Iliad for BBC radio in 1959. Logue's Homer has been worked, performed, and reworked for almost fifty years (1959-2005). Albeit the result of accident rather than design, the prolonged time-span for publication has produced a complex publication history, with Logue's Homer poems circulating in different print versions and simultaneously existing as audio recordings (both on LP and CD) and live performances. Within the poems themselves, the stress on sound and music suggest that these performances should inform the meaning of the printed text, leading to a complex interdependence between the written and spoken word.1 Translation and the Living Word Several twentieth-century translators have been acutely conscious of the potential ephemerality of their translations. Asked about his criteria for translating Homer,2 Robert Fitzgerald stressed the importance of the living language as a means to engage the reader's imagination (Frank and McCord 1984:50): One wanted the English to be, as I've already said, fully alive. That this should be so, the colloquial register of the language had to enter into it. How far should you go with colloquialism? Would slang be useful? Answer: practically never. One would avoid what was transient in speech. The test of a given phrase would be: Is it worthy to be immortal? Whereas Fitzgerald's approach to producing a translation of Homer that is alive privileged diction, his fellow translator, Robert Fagles, stresses the dramatic quality of the Homeric epics and, correspondingly, the importance of performance for his translations of Homer.3 In an interview conducted in 1999, Fagles illustrated this conception of Homer as performance by quoting the dictum, from Alexander Pope's "Preface to the Iliad of Homer" (1715), that "Homer makes us Hearers," adding that one of the most important things for the translator is "to capture the dramatic sense that Homer conveys" (Storace 1999:152). Elsewhere in the interview Fagles reveals that his preferred metaphor for the relationship between the translator and the source text is that of an actor and the role that he has to play (156). This commitment to performance is born out by the success that his translations have achieved as audiobooks, read by the actors Derek Jacobi (Iliad) and Ian McKellen (Odyssey). Stanley Lombardo, another contemporary translator of Homer, combines the approaches of both Fitzgerald and Fagles in order to produce a "living" translation.4 On the subject of poetic register, Lombardo has said that he subjects the diction of his translations to a "fifty-year" rule. According to this rule, the diction of a translation should hold good for fifty years in either direction: that is to say that the language should sound readily intelligible and natural to imaginary audiences projected fifty years back into the past as well as to imaginary audiences projected fifty years into the future.5 At the same time, Lombardo also echoes Fagles in the importance that he assigns to performance as a medium for translation. His translations of the Iliad and Odyssey were composed with an ear for performance, with feedback from actual performances informing the progress of his work.6 In addition, he has also recorded audio versions of his Iliad and Odyssey (Parmenides Publications, 2006; reviewed in Mulligan 2007) and continues to perform his translations in front of live audiences, animating these performances with subtle but powerful percussion to accompany the stress patterns of the spoken voice. With Lombardo, even more so than with Fagles, the reader who reads the text in ignorance of its potential for performance is deprived of the all-important soundtrack. The mention of percussion brings us back to Christopher Logue, the most musical and sound-conscious of Homer's contemporary adaptors. In fact, music has become a byword for Logue's Homer, which is now referred to as War Music (1981), a title that initially referred to a single sequence of the poem (Books 16-19 of...