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This thesis is a study of Christopher Logue’s War Music – in his words, an ‘account’ of Homer’s Iliad, and a poem that pushes at the boundaries of both translation and poetry. I position War Music in the poetic contexts of the mid-late twentieth century, comparing it to other recent works of classical reception, including Alice Oswald’s Memorial and Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles, and to other poetic movements, such as the international concrete poetry movement, and the “Martian” style. I suggest that War Music can and should be analysed as a translation of Homer, and argue that translation is in fact both method and subject matter: Logue makes his translation of the Iliad a visible, active part of the poem, and puts on display the poem’s difference and distance from Homer. My thesis is divided into chapters which analyse the techniques and themes used by Logue to pursue this representation of translation: memory, anachronism, allusion, sound, and typography. Within and across these themes, I focus on similes as a microcosm and a model for translation, and argue that Logue also makes visible the processes that underpin metaphoric comparison. In the final chapter, I suggest that this making-visible in fact extends not only onto translation and comparison, but onto the significatory processes of language itself, as Logue deconstructs and represents the ways in which we construe meaning from language in its material forms: speech, writing, print. |
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