There are two camps when it comes to literary translation. The first, favoring meticulousness and precision, makes the transmission of meaning their number one concern. The second, refusing to obsess over dictionaries, frets instead over sound, sense, and mood. The split, such as it is, boils down to a taste for denotation or for connotation. A useful illustration sets Richmond Lattimore’s fairly literal, remarkably learned version of Homer’s Iliad against Christopher Logue’s radically inventive rendition.
Yet no work so strenuously defines the terms of this dichotomy – between the expert and the interloper, the scholar and the poet – than the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. By way of illustration: At any given point over the last two thousand years, many thousands of people could have been depended on to read Homer’s Greek. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Gilgamesh text was first discovered, it’s estimated that only a couple of hundred people, at any given period, have known enough Akkadian to go toe-to-toe with Gilgamesh in its standard form. That’s to say nothing of the fact that the language problem remains just one of many bafflements when it comes to this text. Simon Armitage would have us imagine a jigsaw puzzle in its place.
But instead of a pretty lake or snowy hillside, imagine the picture is a poem. A long poem. Then imagine many such jigsaws, manufactured over hundreds of years, all showing similar versions of the same poem but created by different makers, and cut into different patterns. Then imagine that the jigsaws, made out of clay, have been tipped from their boxes and scattered to the earth, and the scatterings took place more than two thousand years ago, across several thousand square miles, in war-ton and battle-scarred lands, and that the poem in the picture is written in an obsolete language.
Such a litany of factors, not merely numerous but qualitatively complex, would make any task seem impossible. For a poet like Armitage, who knows no Akkadian, the notion of translating Gilgamesh might have seemed unimaginable. Some specialists would argue (hairy truth be told) he never should have imagined he could! Thankfully, for us, he did. The product of his labor is an impressively readable, unerringly thoughtful Gilgamesh.
It’s the Gilgamesh that only Armitage could write, one that blends a genuine respect for the scholarship (more than a tip of the hat to all those “Lattimores”) with the same poetic instinct that has made him one of our contemporary masters. Of course, the act of translating texts from languages he lacks is nothing new for Britain’s sitting Poet Laureate. Near the start of his career he followed in Logue’s footsteps in endeavoring to retell a Homeric epic without the ability to decipher Ancient Greek. Since then, the same quixotic enterprise has become one of his trademarks. He knows no Middle English, yet it’s his Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that promises (like the Beowulf with which Heaney blessed us) to preserve his name for posterity; it’s that good.
It’s too early in the game to tell if his Gilgamesh will match that high watermark. What can be said is that a full forty pages of frontmatter – a wonderfully comprehensive “Introduction” plus “A Note on the Translation” – ground the work in a way that makes it seem perfectly cast for students, perfectly designed, all said, to assume the contours and proportions of a classroom mainstay. Not that we’ve lacked for one, Andrew George’s Penguin Classics edition having filled the role of authoritative text for more than two decades. If Armitage threatens to supplant him, it’s only because he’s managed to subtract further precipitousness from George’s already viable slope.
In his introduction, Armitage proclaims his “hope of producing critically informed work that speaks to the widest readership” – the gold standard for any sensible reader, and no mean feat given the strangeness of his source text. Gilgamesh is, above all, a narrative poem, and memorably strange events account for the better part of its plot. No one, once they’ve read the poem, can forget the carnal whirlwind that results in the wild man Enkidu’s domestication. Nor can one easily wipe from their memory the pitiful desperation of Humbaba, the forest guardian, as he begs for life when he hangs from it by a thread. Peculiarity of plot aside, though, the steepest spots for most 21st-century readers are likely to consist in the oddness of certain formal devices, apparently popular among the ancients. The degree to which the story is structured and patterned by repetition, for instance, might overtax the patience of some readers. Consider the fourth of the poem’s twelve tablets – like chapters, though literally inscribed in wet clay, in cuneiform, some three thousand years ago by a Babylonian priest named Sîn-lēqi-unninni – in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu march many miles to Mount Lebanon, Gilgamesh dreaming many anxious dreams along the way.
After forty leagues they stopped and broke bread.
After sixty leagues they stopped and pitched camp.
A hundred leagues in a single day!
Mount Lebanon appeared in the distance before them –
a six-week trek in only three days.
Facing Shamash the Sun God they dug a well
and filled their vessels with fresh water.
Gilgamesh climbed to the top of the mountain
and tipped out roasted flour as a sacrifice.
“Mountain, speak sweetly, bring me a dream.”
Enkidu built a house for the Dream God to visit,
made a cover at its entrance to shut out the storm,
drew a circle on the floor for Gilgamesh to lie in,
then laid down himself, like a net, by the door.
Gilgamesh rested his chin on his knees
and sleep poured over him, falling from above.
In the middle of the night he roused from his slumber,
rose to his feet, and said to his comrade:
“Friend, did you call me? Why am I awake?
If you did not touch me why am I startled?
Did a god pass by? Why is my skin numb?
My friend, in my sleep I experienced a vision;
the dream I had was strange and confusing.
The fourth tablet repeats these twenty-three lines, verbatim, five separate times, and amounts to little more. The only divergent material – the content of the dreams followed by Enkidu’s optimistic interpretations of them – serves to bridge the repetitions, doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on Gilgamesh’s fear of failing to accomplish the heroic task that lies before him.
Which makes for an odd proposition, this reading – not skimming or skipping – the same twenty-three lines, over and over and over. By the third repetition, if you aren’t rolling your eyes, you might just notice certain features you failed to notice the first or second time around. By the fifth and final turn, you’re bound to wonder why you don’t do this more often.
But then, this is the kind of book that is always giving you reasons to reread it. Its lyricism is typical of its author, whose best efforts catch you at the margins of the page redoubling your efforts for pleasure, not comprehension. Around Uruk-the-Sheepfold, Gilgamesh’s kingdom, run “ramparts as straight as woolen thread,” “its courses composed of kiln-baked bricks.” Enkidu, before his conversion, is described as “a savage young brute at home in the outlands.” As for Humbaba? His “voice is a raging torrent, / his mouth is the fire god, his breath is death.”
It’s only appropriate that this poem should offer so many opportunities to slow down. Chronicling the foibles, triumphs, and tragedies of its title character, a godlike king who has to learn the hard way what truly matters in life, Gilgamesh is, in part, a cautionary tale about the dangers of speeding ahead, consequences be damned. Frankly, though, if you’ve never read it, you need to run, not walk, to your nearest bookstore, and pick up a copy of this marvelous new translation of a timeless work, our best, most lucid and fluent Gilgamesh to date.
Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, and American Book Review, among others.
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