Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic

Preface

Preface Why is a scholar of modern European literature writing about Gilgamesh ? This book began as chapter 2 of a work tentatively entitled “The Road to Hell,” in which I planned to explore modern literary variations of such mortuary journeys as those depicted in the myths and literatures of the ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome and in the Christian tradition . But when I had finished the introduction and turned to the epic of Gilgamesh as the earliest ancient example, my material rapidly reached a point at which I realized that the topic deserved more extensive scrutiny— treatment perhaps analogous to that of my earlier books Virgil and the Moderns, Ovid and the Moderns, and Minos and the Moderns. So I abandoned the initial project and devoted myself instead to the modern reception of Gilgamesh. I can no longer recall when I first encountered Gilgamesh or in which translation I first read the epic. By the time I was a graduate student of German literature at Yale University in the early 1950s, I was familiar with the epic because it figured in the thought and works of so many of the x Preface modern writers with whom I was concerned: notably Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann, but also Hans Henny Jahnn, Carl Gustav Jung, and others. For many years that great foundation stone of world literature remained little more than that for me: a touchstone in my reading of various modern writers. Gradually, as the occurrence of such cases—translations, retellings, adaptations, musical and visual versions— became more frequent, I began noting them sporadically. The first opportunity to discuss the epic, if only briefly, presented itself in the opening pages of The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations. It was only when I had committed myself to a book on “Gilgamesh and the Moderns” that I began to look systematically for modernizations of the theme in Western literature and culture and to acquaint myself with the fascinating story of the rediscovery of the epic, its early decipherment and study by professional scholars of the Near East, and its initial transmission and reception by a broader public. I should emphasize at the outset that I am by no stretch of the imagination an Assyriologist: I can neither decipher the cuneiform script nor translate the transliterated text. I have studied extensively and appreciatively many works by the scholars of Mesopotamian literature of the past century and a half and made grateful use of their findings. However, I was reassured that my enterprise would not be utterly pretentious by the fact that, almost without exception, the modern Western writers with whom I deal also knew no Akkadian and relied solely on translations in their various languages. Indeed, even many “translations” of the epic are not based on the original but have been adapted from other translations. (I have tried to indicate these distinctions consistently.) Unlike classical antiquity, where one can usually take for granted at least a modest acquaintance with Latin and Greek on the part of writers who take their subjects from that realm, Mesopotamian culture offers a wholly different set of problems. That realm, whose glories have been exposed to our eyes by first-rate scholars of the Near East, has in the past halfcentury caught the imagination not only of novelists, poets, dramatists, composers, and graphic artists but also of the general public in the Western world. Their vivid response, I believe, now deserves at least a preliminary assessment. (I leave it to the appropriately qualified scholars to explore the resonance of the epic in modern Arabic literatures and in the Far East.) Apart from a few articles comparing Gilgamesh with individual works from the twentieth century, which I have cited in the notes, I know of Preface xi only two general studies. Christine Hopps’s innovative dissertation “Mythotextuality and the Evolution of Ideologies: The Reuse of the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ in North American Texts” (Université de Sherbrooke, 2001) discusses several, though by no means all, novels, adaptations, television programs, and children’s books published in Québécois and English in Canada and the United States. In her feminist analysis, Hopps organizes her twelve writers into three categories of four each: “Goddess Rising,” or the effort in the 1960s and 1970s, based on newly discovered Sumerian texts, to reinstate Ishtar and the other goddesses in the matriarchal roles from which, according to her theory, they were dethroned by the later Akkadians ; “Mythic Authority” of...