<div><b><i>Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly,</i></b><br><b><i>Emptying her blood-red mouth—set in her ice-white face—</i></b><br><b><i>Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:</i></b><br><br><b><i>“Kill! Kill for me!</i></b><br><b><i>Better to die than live without killing!”</i></b><br><br><b><i>Who says prayer does no good?</i></b><br><br>Christopher Logue's work in progress, his Iliad, has been called “the best translation of Homer since Pope's” (<i>The New York Review of Books</i>). Here in <i>All Day Permanent Red </i>is doomed Hector, the lion, “slam-scattering the herd” at the height of his powers. Here is the Greek army rising with a sound like a “sky-wide Venetian blind.” Here is an arrow's tunnel, “the width of a lipstick,” through a neck. Like Homer himself, Logue is quick to mix the ancient and the new, because his Troy exists outside time, and no translator has a more Homeric interest in the truth of battle, or in the absurdity and sublimity of war.<br></div> <div><b><i>Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly,</i></b><br><b><i>Emptying her blood-red mouth—set in her ice-white face—</i></b><br><b><i>Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:</i></b><br><br><b><i>“Kill! Kill for me!</i></b><br><b><i>Better to die than live without killing!”</i></b><br><br><b><i>Who says prayer does no good?</i></b><br><br>Christopher Logue's work in progress, his Iliad, has been called “the best translation of Homer since Pope's” (<i>The New York Review of Books</i>). Here in <i>All Day Permanent Red </i>is doomed Hector, the lion, “slam-scattering the herd” at the height of his powers. Here is the Greek army rising with a sound like a “sky-wide Venetian blind.” Here is an arrow's tunnel, “the width of a lipstick,” through a neck. Like Homer himself, Logue is quick to mix the ancient and the new, because his Troy exists outside time, and no translator has a more Homeric interest in the truth of battle, or in the absurdity and sublimity of war.<br></div>