All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of ; Homer's "Iliad"; Christopher Logue; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 54 pp., $18

War Music: An Account of Books 1 to 4 and 16 to 19 of Homer's "Iliad"; Christopher Logue; University of Chicago Press: 240 pp., $16

The literature of war begins with literature itself, with "The Iliad." Homer's epic about the Greek siege of Troy, composed perhaps 2,800 years ago, still stands unexcelled as an expression of the devastating power of war, the tragedy it begets and the emotions it unleashes -- its glamour as well as its horror. Although "The Odyssey," the other epic poem by Homer, has a sexier storyline and more sensational supernatural effects, among connoisseurs of classical poetry "The Iliad" retains a position of unassailable paramountcy, for its greater antiquity and its profound insights into the human condition. No work of art has ever done a better job of explaining why men go to war, and it does so not with explanations but by a succession of compelling, unforgettable images. The challenge of rendering "The Iliad" into a modern idiom remains the same now as it was 400 years ago, when George Chapman produced the first English version: how to express those images in a way that speaks to the contemporary reader directly, as the Greek text did.

Christopher Logue's "Iliad" began life in 1959 as an assignment to work on a radio script for the BBC. He had never studied Greek, so he worked entirely from translations, ranging from Chapman's to E.V. Rieu's sturdy prose version, published in 1950 (but surprisingly, it seems, without consulting Richmond Lattimore's widely praised rendering). His work on the project was desultory; the first volume, "War Music," didn't appear until 1984. Three more volumes have followed: "Kings" (1991), "The Husbands" (1994) and now "All Day Permanent Red." (Although Logue has never, as far as I know, stated an intention to create a full version of "The Iliad" -- and having covered less than half of it thus far, the 77-year-old poet probably won't do so unless he picks up the pace significantly -- he has produced a considerable body of verse.)