Christopher Logue's War Music is not 'a translation in the accepted sense'. It's not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson's remark that a translation's merit should be judged by 'its effect as an English poem', since Johnson was talking about translations, whereas Logue's poem is a variety of 'poetical imitation' and belongs to a perfectly good tradition of English poems based on or played off against an older (often Classical) original. A modern model might be Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius, which it resembles in its style of selective ironic commentary and in some Poundian mannerisms, as in the jeering lyricism of the scene where Thetis calls together her sister Nereids, 'kith of King Nayruce' (Nereus).

LRB 2 July 1981 | PDF Download