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2 Representative Beginnings (1941–1958) Modes of Modernization Since the mid-twentieth century, the Gilgamesh story has been treated in a variety of aesthetic forms: fiction, poetry, drama, opera, film, painting , and beyond. These treatments, however varied they may be, use one of four basic modes of modernization. First, and most straightforward, is translation, ranging from highly literal to free (as we have noted in the early examples already considered). In the following pages we shall not be concerned primarily with translations, except as sources; any detailed consideration would require an authoritative command of the original languages . However, the very frequency of translation is in itself an indication of the popularity of the topic. Second, we will encounter a number of fictionalizing and dramatic revisions of the theme: that is, works that retell the story in its original period and setting while imposing upon it a viewpoint and values characteristic of the writer’s own age. Familiar examples based on other myths are Thomas 48 Chapter 2 Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933–44), Robert Graves’s King Jesus (1946), or Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March (1948). The third mode may be called postfigurative: that is, works set in the writer’s own time but whose action clearly follows a pattern identified with a mythic model. The most famous example, and the one that established the genre in the twentieth century, is doubtless James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). As T. S. Eliot observed in a frequently cited essay on “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923), Joyce’s “parallel use of the Odyssey” has the importance of a scientific discovery. “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. . . . It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”1 Other familiar cases are the postfigurations of the Faust legend in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947) and John Hersey’s Too Far to Walk (1966) or of the Gospels in Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine (1936) and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Finally, there is a catch-all category that might be called broadly thematic or motivic analogues: that is, works sometimes known as “pseudonyms ” or imitatio that seek by certain means—notably titles, names, mottos, textual allusions—to establish a loose thematic connection with the source work. A well-known example is James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), in which the hero’s name Stephen Dedalus, the motto from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Stephen’s vision of a “hawklike man whose name he bore” as a symbol of the artist associate the novel with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, although the plot is not a postfiguration of the myth as we know it from Ovid. In the following pages we shall encounter works from all four categories or modes. Four Poets in English The first significant postwar English adaptation of the epic was Gilgamesh : King of Erech (1948) by the prolific British poet and critic Frank Laurence Lucas (1894–1967). Apparently Lucas did not trust his audience as being hardy enough to deal with the unadulterated Babylonian Representative Beginnings (1941–1958) 49 poem, which is “brief, bitter, yet intensely dear” and offers “no consolation beyond the grave” in its “eternal gloom” (6).2 His work, neither translation nor paraphrase, is “a free retelling” of the epic in free verse, which “alters, or expands, or abridges, the often fragmentary or unintelligible original in many small details” (62). The author not only omits many figures and episodes—the “rather tedious premonitory dreams (with a noticeable homosexual tinge),” which he considers “uninteresting” (57); the deities, whom he regards as “more tedious than most” (58); the Siduri scene; the “Stone Things.” He even changes several names out of consideration for delicate English sensibilities: he uses “Ziusudra,” as he confides in his notes, because Ut-napishtim is “more grotesque than poetic to English ears” (56), and “Engidu,” because Enkidu is “slightly grotesque in English” (56); he avoids the name “Humbaba” altogether because it is “as impossible in English verse as Wordsworth’s Jones” (57). His adaptation, which is based on several earlier translations—the notes cite Ungnad, Ranke, Campbell Thompson, and Alexander Heidel (see below)—rearranges the entire story, recasting it as a narrative that...

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