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3 The Popularization of Gilgamesh (1959–1978) Whereas the immediate postwar reception of Gilgamesh from 1945 to the late 1950s was largely a consciously cultural affair involving cult poets, controversial novelists, experimental artists, and the opera-going public, the next fifteen years witnessed a significant popularization of the epic and a broadening of its thematic uses. A host of translations made the work available for the first time to audiences in Czechoslovakia (1958 by Lubor Matouš), Japan (1965 by F. Yajima), and Romania (1966 by V. Servanescu), while French, Italian, Russian, and Arabic readers were presented with new translations (1958 by Paul Garelli; 1958 by Giuseppe Furlani; 1961 by Igor Diakonoff; 1967 by A. Fariha). The Epic of Gilgamesh, Nancy Sandars’s English version (1960), published by Penguin and frequently reprinted, remained for several decades the version of choice for many college courses.1 Her smoothly readable prose text, based on the translations by Alexander Heidel, E. A. Speiser, and Campbell Thompson, is divided into seven chapters rather than twelve tablets and, omitting the formulaic repetitions, lacks much of the 80 Chapter 3 grim dignity of the original. At the same time, the edition provided an informative introduction surveying the history, background, theology, and diction of the epic. (Sandars’s version remained the standard Penguin text until it was replaced in 1999 by Andrew George’s original and now authoritative translation.) Meanwhile, translations in Germany continued apace. In 1958 Albert Schott’s 1934 translation was revised and updated by the eminent Assyriologist Wolfram von Soden for the popular Reclam series.2 That same year, Georg Burckhardt’s enduringly popular adaptation was reprinted with woodcuts by Hans-Joachim Walch. In 1966 Hartmut Schmökel, a German scholar of the ancient Near East, brought out a faithful yet eminently readable translation of the epic (Das Gilgamesch-Epos) into blank verse, arguing that the rhythms of that basic German metrical form correspond to the rhythms of the common four- or five-beat Assyrian line.3 The translator allowed himself a degree of flexibility: for instance, to avoid tedious repetition he used different terms to vary certain stock phrases in the original (“underworld,” “realm of the dead,” or “Hades”; a variety of expressions for “he said”). Although the translation indicates its progression from line to line and from tablet to tablet, the translator divides his version into seven major sections with numerous subheadings to assist the reader’s comprehension. Against this background of availability, the popularizations of the epic began to emerge. On May 19, 1958, “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was performed by a student organization at Wageningen in the presence of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands (in a dramatization based on the 1941 translation by Franz Böhl). The highly praised performance, its dramatic dialogues introduced by a narrator, was produced essentially without textual changes and without distracting modernizations.4 In the summer of 1960, the Los Angeles radio station KPFK—an affiliate of the progressive Pacifica Radio, which featured such cultural programs as readings of The Odyssey and performances of Stravinsky—offered an eight-part reading of Sandars’s translation by Mitchell Harding, a local radio celebrity. In 1964 the Museum für Gewerbe und Kunst in Hamburg sponsored an exhibition entitled “Gilgamesch” featuring graphic works by artists we have already encountered: Richard Janthur, Josef Hegenbarth, Rolf Nesch, Willi Baumeister , and Emil Schumacher. The Popularization of Gilgamesh (1959–1978) 81 In 1966 Young Scott Books brought out Anita Feagles’s He Who Saw Everything, a retelling of the epic for youthful readers with illustrations by Xavier Gonzales. A year later Gilgamesh: Man’s First Story (1967) was published by Bernarda Bryson, wife of Ben Shahn and a prize-winning author and illustrator of children’s books. Her “highly personal account,” which is based on readings from the time when she first became acquainted with the epic in the late 1920s, contains no mention of the hero’s womanizing: we hear simply that “our girls languish without lovers” (14) and that Enkidu feels “great contentment in merely sitting beside” the young woman sent to tame him.5 Utnapishtim comes across as an angry old man, who ridicules Gilgamesh and scornfully tells his wife “how deceitful are the ways of mortals! I must prove to this one that he is not fit to dwell among us” (84). In a final section, “Gilgamesh At Last Finds Enkidu,” he goes to the gate of the underworld and pleads with Nergal to release his friend; when that...

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