Gilgamesh: A Review

In a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Darmok” — an episode I previously wrote about here — Captain Picard finds himself trying to communicate with Dathon, the captain of an alien vessel whose mental framework is incomprehensible to that of Picard and, indeed, the entire Federation. Dathon’s people communicate solely through allusion to their inheritance of story. They say things like “Shaka, when the walls fell” or “Temba, his arms wide” with the expectation that the people they are speaking to will know the story and will understand its applicability to the current situation. But it takes Picard a while to figure this out, and indeed he only fully figures it out after Dathon has been mortally wounded. Rather than leaving him to die in isolation and silence, Picard tells him a story. And the story he tells is the story of Gilgamesh — the oldest human story that has survived.

We know nothing of its origins except that it was almost surely composed orally in Mesopotamia (the southern region of modern Iraq), probably as a series of tales only vaguely connected to one another. A cycle of such poems was produced over four thousand years ago in Sumerian (an “isolate,” a language with no known family) and inscribed on clay tablets. Some centuries later, when Sumerian had given way as a living language to the Semitic language Akkadian, but was still known to scholars, a longer and more unified Akkadian version was inscribed on clay tablets and thus preserved. In the 1850s these tablets were found in the ruins of the great library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (who reigned 668–627 B.C.) in Nineveh. Eventually they were translated, and more tablets were discovered, so that we ended up with a more-or-less coherent narrative now known as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The part of the epic that especially appeals to Captain Picard is the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, a “wild man” who was formed by the gods out of clay to be an opponent to Gilgamesh, whom the gods (correctly) found arrogant and overly aggressive. But instead of hating one another, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become the closest of friends. And this is the story that Picard wants to share with his new friend. The idea that hundreds of years in the future, one of our descendants might see a particular relevance in the oldest story known to us is a remarkable imaginative leap — and an affirmation of shared human experience.

So: the Epic of Gilgamesh is the name commonly given to a set of fragments of various sizes that tell events from the life of Gilgamesh, who appears to have been a historical person. We do not have the whole story, and that the parts we have do not fit into an obvious order. Attempts to piece together the essential story already make the assumption that it is a story and is not just a series of tales featuring the same protagonist. Because the various episodes are not clearly and obviously connected to one another, and because there are gaps within them, scholars who work on these cuneiform tablets have many decisions to make. They must decide how to order the episodes, what they think is essential to the story and what isn’t, what belongs and what does not. And once all that is done, the next task becomes translation — rendering it into a modern language accessible to people who cannot read ancient cuneiform.

What qualifies someone to translate such a work? The initially obvious answer is: the person with the deepest knowledge of the original language. But suppose what is being translated is a story, or a poem. What if scholars know the ancient language very well but are not very familiar with stories or poems? Would they be likely to make good choices in their translations? On the other hand, a person who is familiar with stories and poems might be able to make a number of appropriate choices — but if that person has a limited understanding of the original language, or does not know it at all, there is always the danger that the translator will be imposing an order, a meaning, or a character on the text. It is very rare to find someone equally skilled in the language of a text and in its genre or form.

My view is that when I’m coming to something new, I want a translation that will be exciting, that will make the text vivid to me. I am happy to risk inaccuracy in order to have a good readerly experience. If at some later point I want to learn more — to get into the weeds, into the technical details, into the complexities and difficulties — I can do so. But if the translation bores me, I’ll put it down, and I will never have an experience vivid enough to make me want to learn more. So when I am reading not as a scholar but simply as a reader, give me the translation that is going to speak to me, that is going to touch me. Later on, I can raise questions — and perhaps answer questions — about its accuracy.

For that reason — and I say this as someone who has read at least five different translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh (my previous favorite being David Ferry’s) — I contend that the ideal place to begin is the new translation by Simon Armitage. Armitage has already proven himself to be an excellent translator from languages he knows: his version of the medieval English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is dramatically superior to any other on offer, as is his rendition of another poem by that same anonymous poet, the lamentably neglected Pearl (I need to write abour Pearl here one day). He has done a great deal of work to make his translation of Gilgamesh as accurate as possible, drawing extensively on the knowledge of people who do know the language — especially Jacob L. Dahl, an Assyriologist at Oxford University — but also takes the opportunity to seek poetic and narrative excellence. In contrast to the scholarly versions that indicate every gap in the surviving text, Armitage declares that it is “not improper … to favor readability and a sense of poetic wholeness over the worship of its accidental breakages.” And right he is to say so.

In short, Armitage has done his homework as well as it can possibly be done, and his gifts as a poet and a raconteur are also very much in evidence here. His version of Gilgamesh is as vivid, life-affirming, and human as the retelling of the story that Captain Picard offers his dying friend.

The story of Gilgamesh is a story of a man with great gifts. He is creative, ambitious, physically powerful, imaginative.

Faultless Gilgamesh, towering and threatening,
who forged new routes through impassable mountains,
sank wells in the arid slopes of the foothills,
sailed the wide sea to where the sun rises,
sought eternal life at the edge of the world,
reached Uta-napishti’s faraway realm.
He restored temples the Great Flood had ruined,
brought ritual and ceremony to the lost multitudes.
Who can stand as his equal or rival his right?
Or proclaim, as he can, “I am king above all”?

But he is also, because of those very gifts, implacably hostile to anyone who stands in his way. He feels himself empowered and entitled to destroy anyone whose existence does not clearly fit into his own plans and purposes. He is a kind of superman, and he certainly thinks of himself as such. And even when the gods create a wild man for the express purpose of destroying him, he cannot be defeated.

But something odd happens to him in that encounter. The wild man who was made out of clay to be his enemy becomes his companion in adventure. Now, Enkidu, being made of clay, is mortal. Gilgamesh, who is, we are told, one-third mortal and two-thirds divine, does not think of himself as being subject to the same laws of nature that Enkidu is subject to. But when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is devastated by his grief.

May the carefree young folk of Uruk mourn you;
the boys grieving your death like your brothers,
the girls untying their hair like your sisters.
May mothers and fathers mourn you, Enkidu.
And on that day, I will mourn you too.
Hear me, young men, hear my grief.
Hear me, elders of sprawling Uruk.
I will cry in sorrow for Enkidu my friend,
like a funeral woman I will mourn bitterly.
Enkidu my axe, my trusty arm, the sword in my sheath,
my protecting shield, my festival robe, my belt of plenty:
an evil wind has robbed me of you. […]
Enkidu did not lift his head.
Gilgamesh touched his lifeless heart
and covered his face like a veiled bride
and circled around him like a soaring eagle.

He not only strives to create a great memorial to Enkidu, he also begins to wonder whether he too might be mortal. And this confrontation with what is at first prospective, but then later actual, mortality is the most important event in Gilgamesh’s life.

In Isak Dinesen’s memoir Out of Africa, she describes her love for a man named Denys Finch-Hatton, and tells how, when they were both living in Kenya, they would go to a high place in the Ngong Hills and look out across the Great Rift Valley.

There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills, from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: ‘Let us drive as far as our graves.’ Once when we were camped in the hills to look for Buffalo, we had in the afternoon walked over to the slope to have a closer look at it. There was an infinitely great view from there; in the light of the sunset we saw both Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. Denys had been eating an orange, lying in the grass, and had said that he would like to stay there. My own burial-place was a little higher up. From both places we could see my house in the forest far away to the East. We were going back there the next day, for ever, I thought, in spite of the widespread theory that All must die.

What is lovely and true about this is how they talk freely and cheerfully of their graves and their burial-place but, in fact, do not really subscribe to “the widespread theory that All must die.” Harsh events must force them to accept that the “theory” is indeed correct.

So too with Gilgamesh. The death of Enkidu plants the seed, and the seed gradually grows. With great reluctance, and with the help of Uta-napishti, survivor of the Universal Flood, he eventually comes to acknowledge and accept that his fate will be the same as that of his dear friend. Uta-napishti tells him,

At the greatest assembly of the Anunnaki,
the goddess Aruru decreed man’s fate:
the gods will give and take away life,
and no man will know when death will strike.

And, thanks to Armitage’s translation, we accompany Gilgamesh, our fellow human being, to this understanding. Some of us believe that death need not be proud of his power, but death comes for us all.

Enkidu and Gilgamesh in the Cedar Forest. Gilgamesh and Uta-napishti on the Waters of Death.