David McDougall

dyingtoknow asked: Recommended translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh? The Proust one was a treat. Are there any other literary translations you love?

lazenby:

There are a few things that make the Epic of Gilgamesh different from other objects of translation. The first is that archaeology has provided it to us in nearly a dozen, occasionally irreconcilable, versions.

The situation is something like this: there was an historical king named Gilgamesh/Bilgameš. He ruled a city called Uruk, now in Iraq, around 4,600 years ago. This man either commissioned a personal myth of his kingship or adopted a previously existing myth as his own. This in turn becomes the source for all extant versions of the epic. The story was powerful enough to have been written down in at least three successive languages.

The earliest of these was Sumerian. This was probably the first language to have been written down and may have been the language for which writing itself was invented. It has no clear ancestry and may be a relic of the linguistic era before our own. Today, nearly every language on Earth can be traced to fourteen or fifteen mother tongues. This is how you move from English, to Anglo-Saxon, to Germanic, to Proto-Germanic, until you’re all the way back at the last common ancestor of Sanskrit and the European languages. This is the direct ancestor of around 585 languages spoken in Europe and Asia. This language, Proto-Indo-European, was last spoken around five thousand years ago. And there you hit the barrier separating what we think of as civilization from what came before: the neolithic era. I.e., whatever the painters of those French caves were speaking, we can be reasonably sure that it bore no relation to any modern European tongue. (The language of the neolithic cave painters and that of the Proto-Indo-Europeans are separated by something like 20,000 years and 2,000 miles.) At any rate, the idea is that Sumerian may have been a language out of this neolithic era and this is why it cannot be related to any modern tongue. Sumerian might even have been a conglomeration of all the neolithic languages spoken in Mesopotamia and so served as the language in which all the various neolithic tribes could converse. (If this is the case Sumerian becomes exceptionally important in the history of civilization because it represents the first, deliberate attempt by humans to overcome linguistic, and presumably cultural, barriers for the sake of common purpose.) Anyway, because of its importance to the first complex Mesopotamian societies Sumerian becomes the first language to be written down there. (Writing seems to have been invented as a way of keeping books, and only later as a means of recording speech, tho if you ask me a writing system that impresses numbers onto durable media is already preserving spoken language.) The epic seems not to have been as developed in Sumerian as it would later become.

Then the people who spoke Sumerian begin to speak another language unrelated to it: Akkadian. However, Sumerian still has a great deal of prestige attached to it and scribes continue to learn it as a written language for hundreds of years after it ceases to be their first language of speech. (In this, Sumerian has a lot in common with Latin, which persisted as a common written language in Europe for something like fourteen hundred years after its last native speaker had died.) Akkadian is eventually written down, in two phases: The earlier of these tends to be called Old Akkadian and the later, some variety of Babylonian (Old, Middle, Late, etc.) The epic exists fragmentarily in all of these varieties but the most complete version is in a type of Akkadian reserved for literary uses. You can think of this as a deliberately archaic dialect that is kept around because of the prestige its antiquity confers. This is the language in which the real poetry, and a good deal of the immortal human resonance, get added to the story.

A professional exorcist named Sin-leqi-unninni, writing in Akkadian about 3,200 years ago, is the nearest thing to the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh. He acts something like a funnel. He collects and edits all previous versions of the story, renders them into poetry and creates a standard text. Nearly all the fragments of the epic created after Sin-leqi-unninni appear to be copies or close derivatives of his earlier work. This is important because the best preserved copy of the epic we have is incomplete. (This copy exists on a dozen clay tablets, each about the size of a slice of sandwich bread.) By paying close attention to the gaps in Sin-leqi’s version it’s just possible to patch it with later material. What you’ll read in any translation will be the result of a hundred and fifty years of this work. By no means complete.

So it should be clear that translating the Epic of Gilgamesh is not just a matter of having a poetic ear and a good Akkadian dictionary. There are a huge number of textual problems, each of which requires that a scholarly choice be made. Were the Sumerians smelting the iron meteorites that occasionally fell in the deserts surrounding their cities? Is this why the king’s axe receives pride of place among his attributes, because it was literally celestial? And is this why heaven-sent Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s friend, is referred to as his axe? And does this mean that whenever the poet talks about ‘a stone from heaven’ he’s really talking about metal? And on and on and on. The list of problems and unresolved questions of usage would, and does, fill a sizeable second volume of any translation.

Anyway, all of this is just a long way of saying that there is really only one guy who balances the huge knowledge of the language needed to translate the epic with the poetic sense needed to translate it well. That is Andrew George and this is his version.

20 Questions for Looking Into Your Relationship

1. Are you in love?

2. Are you still in love?

3. Do you want to reconnect with the person who used to be the one you love?

4. Do you think that this person is happy?

5. Do you have the time for each other?

6. Have you been able to preserve your true presence for yourself and for the other person?

7. Are you capable of offering him or freshness every day?

8. Do you know how to handle the suffering in yourself?

9. Are you able to help handle the suffering in the other person?

10. Do you understand the roots of your own suffering?

11. Are you able to understand the suffering in the other person?

12. Do you have the capacity to help the other person suffer less?

13. Have you learned the way to calm down your painful feelings and emotions?

14. Do you have the time to listen to yourself and your deepest desire?

15. Do you have the time to listen to him or her and to help him or her suffer less?

16. Are you capable of creating a feeling of joy for yourself?

17. Are you capable of helping the other person to create a feeling of joy?

18. Do you feel you have a clear spiritual path?

19. Do you have the feeling of peace and contentment within yourself?

20. Do you know how to nourish your love every day?

from Thich Nhat Hanh’s How to Love

“It has been one of the tasks of art to take what is most painful in the human condition, and to redeem it in a work of beauty”

— Roger Scruton Quotes (@Scruton_Quotes) August 2, 2016

I love the ground under his feet
& the air over his head
& everything he touches
& every word he says..him entirely
& all together

E.Brontë

— oscillating (@snoopydroopied) August 25, 2016

2000-2009

Thanks to a tweet from Neil Bahadur, I made an accidental top ten of my favourite films from 2000-2009. On further reflection I wouldn’t change it. 

Don’t touch the axe / In Vanda’s Room / Regular Lovers / In Praise of Love / In the City of Sylvia / Still Life / Let the Right One In / Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind / Christopher Columbus The Enigma / Colossal Youth