Well before Noah, another ancient shipbuilder, named Utnapishtim, sailed the waters of a universal flood. His tale was told by the Babylonians in the second millennium B.C., or even earlier, and ultimately got inserted into a larger narrative, the tale of a king named Gilgamesh. In one of the episodes of his own story, Gilgamesh hears Utnapishtim’s account of how he survived the flood and became immortalized.
The tablet on which this episode was recorded, along with thousands of other stones inscribed in cuneiform writing, emerged in the mid-19th century with the discovery, in present-day Iraq, of the library of an ancient Assyrian king. British excavators shipped the hoard of tablets back to London, and linguists set to work decoding the difficult script. In 1872 a young scholar named George Smith came upon the story of Utnapishtim and his flood-survival while sorting through the broken slabs. As he read its contents, he began dashing about the study room, removing his clothes in excitement. The modern world thus gained its first, intoxicating glimpse of a poem that had slept for thousands of years.
Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
By Michael Schmidt
Princeton, 165 pages, $24.95
As other tablets emerged with more pieces of “Gilgamesh,” it became clear that the poem’s account of the Flood was one of many stories that an ancient bard—he gives his name as Sin-leqi-unninni—had woven together. The resulting “epic,” as it is sometimes termed, follows the existential struggle of a flawed ruler whose mixed parentage renders him part human and part god. Like Achilles, a figure similarly caught between human and divine status, Gilgamesh must in the end accept his mortal condition, in part by finding his place within the social order.
In “Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem,” Michael Schmidt, a British poet and novelist, explains how the special character of “Gilgamesh” has had an outsize influence on modern writers. “All poems are unique, but Gilgamesh is more unique than most,” he claims, in that it lacks a “creative event,” an account (real or fictional) of its own genesis. Sin-leqi-unninni may have set our version down in writing, but “Gilgamesh” is effectively “a poem without a poet.” Its “anonymity” invites readers’ responses more powerfully than other ancient works, and this book is, in the main, an exploration of those responses, obtained by Mr. Schmidt through a survey sent to 50 modern poets.
When “Gilgamesh” opens, its title character is sorely troubling the people of Uruk, the Sumerian kingdom over which he rules. Rather than see Uruk tyrannized, the gods intervene, producing the poem’s most memorable creation, a figure named Enkidu. When we first meet him, Enkidu is a shaggy child of nature, a wild man who lopes with antelopes and gazelles—until he meets the “sacred prostitute” Shamhat. This woman, a priestess who serves the goddess Ishtar, civilizes the wild man with seven days of love making. Enkidu’s transformation prepares the way for his entry into Uruk, where he meets Gilgamesh and a powerful bond is formed.
The partnership of the two heroes serves as the linchpin for much of what then transpires. Together they face their great trial, a battle with the monster Humbaba, and together they triumph. But when Gilgamesh offends the gods, by spurning the seductions of Ishtar, Enkidu becomes a kind of proxy and pays for his friend’s transgression with his life. Agonized with grief, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey to Utnapishtim, seeking to understand how a fellow human being had bent the iron laws of mortality. In the land of death, he fails the tests that would have exempted him from those laws; he returns to Uruk a wiser man, perhaps, and less of a tyrant.
The strangeness of the Gilgamesh poem, with its phantasmagoric landscapes and its interest in hybrid, half-human beings, is matched by the strangeness of its physical form. The broken stone tablets, incised with braille-like, wedge-shaped marks, make “Gilgamesh” a far more remote artifact than the Homeric epics with which it is often compared (and which it may have influenced). Its language, too, is more obscure, understood by only a tiny number of specialists. It remains incomplete to this day, missing about a 10th of the lines once recorded by Sin-leqi-unninni, though more are recovered year by year as new fragments come to light.
These opacities and gaps are obstacles for some readers but fascinations to others. Mr. Schmidt is decidedly in the latter camp. His first encounter with the old N.K. Sandars translation of “Gilgamesh,” in the Penguin Classics series, evoked the technique of the modern poets he admired, including Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky. “Here was a modern modernist resource,” he writes. Just as H.D. and Ezra Pound, as early Imagists, drew inspiration from the epigrams of the Greeks, Mr. Schmidt and his fellow poets found the “Gilgamesh” slabs, with their jagged edges and broken-off lines, a spur to formal innovation.
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Many contemporary writers have had similarly fruitful encounters with “Gilgamesh,” and several have translated or adapted the poem. In the most engaging sections of his book, Mr. Schmidt surveys these modern responses and samples recent styles of translation. His old Penguin version, he finds, had grossly distorted the poem by giving it a first-person narrator and appending a spurious resolution. Even the title of that edition—“The Epic of Gilgamesh”—misleads, for Mr. Schmidt is convinced that the term “epic” falsely domesticates the poem, assimilating it to the more familiar works of Homer and Vergil. In Mr. Schmidt’s eyes, these stable and author-bound texts speak in a very different register than authorless, volatile “Gilgamesh.”
This book should not be mistaken for a straightforward introduction to “Gilgamesh,” though it does include a summary of the poem’s contents. It is forged instead from Mr. Schmidt’s own meditations on the poem and those he has collected from other poets. When he does engage in explication of the text, his prose can be demanding. To take one example, he describes the relationship of Enkidu and Gilgamesh as “emblematic of the ways in which narrative fact requires the complementarity of invention and its illuminating irony.”
Such cryptic forays into crit-speak are balanced, however, by pithy insights that light up both the page and the poem. “The distances between those who do not die (the gods) and those who do (their subjects),” Mr. Schmidt writes in describing the religious landscape of “Gilgamesh,” “could be measured with a good pedometer.” His freshly framed observations help renew one of the world’s oldest surviving tales.
—Mr. Romm is the editor and translator of “How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life,” a selection of Seneca’s writings.
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