Epic for a New Generation

Epic for a New Generation David Damrosch Gilgamesh: A Verse Play Poetry by Yusef Komunyakaa Concept and Dramaturgy by Chad Gracia Wesleyan University Press http://www.wesleyan.edu/wespress 116 pages; cloth, $22.95 Buried in the sands of Mesopotamia for more than two thousand years, The Epic of Gilgamesh was rapidly recognized as a masterpiece when it was deciphered in the 1870s. Indeed, it is the oldest major literary work to have come down to us, created when a Babylonian poet fashioned a cycle of poems into a connected poetic narrative nearly four thousand years ago, and then expanded into its definitive form around 1200 BCE, hundreds of years before Homer. It has fascinated modern poets ever since it came to light; in 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke declared that "Gilgamesh is stupendous!...I consider it to be the greatest thing that can happen to a person." The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa is the latest writer to have fallen under Gilgamesh's spell, thanks to an enterprising theatrical producer and dramaturge, Chad Gracia, who introduced him to the epic. Gilgamesh: A Verse Play is the product of a year-long collaboration in which Gracia and Komunyakaa workshopped scenes with a group of actors, seeking to recast the epic's story in dramatic form. The epic original certainly doesn't lack for drama. In its 3,000 lines (some 2,000 of which survive), The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of the restless, headstrong Gilgamesh, king of Uruk in southern Babylonia. Gilgamesh spends his time oppressing his subjects—he likes to rape brides on their wedding nights—until the gods create a wild man, Enkidu, to come to the city and knock some sense into him. Set loose in the open countryside, Enkidu runs around with the animals until a temple prostitute treats him to an epic bout of lovemaking (he stays erect for seven days and nights), whereupon his animal friends abandon him and he reluctantly agrees to come to Uruk. There, he wrestles Gilgamesh to the ground as he prepares to go in to violate a bride. Gilgamesh has met his match, and the two become fast friends. Order is restored in the city, but the restless king can't stay still for long. He presses Enkidu to join him on an arduous journey to adistantcedarforest, where they do battle with the forest's guardian ogre, Humbaba, "whose speech is fire, and whose breath is death." Returning home victorious, Gilgamesh attracts the attention of the goddess of love, Ishtar, who solicits him as her lover, but he rejects her as fickle and promiscuous , insulting her—or her vagina— as an oven that melts ice and a shoe that pinches the foot of the wearer. Enraged, Ishtar sends down a gigantic bull from heaven to destroy him, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu together slay the bull, at which point Ishtar condemns Enkidu to a lingering early death. All of this dramatic action is only the prelude to the epic's main adventure. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is overcome with griefand fear ofdeath, and he sets out on a long, dangerous journey to find his distant ancestor Utnapishtim, a Noah figure who with his wife survived the great Flood that had devastated the world. After struggles with lions and scorpion people, Gilgamesh finally reaches Utnapishtim and is given a plant that will rejuvenate him—but then he falls asleep and a serpent comes and steals the plant away. Gilgamesh returns home to Uruk, devastated by the failure ofhis epic quest; in the poem's closing lines, he comforts himself with the sight of the magnificent walls he has build to protect his city. Gilgamesh is a timeless tale offriendship, love, and the value of civilization in the face of death, but it is also the story of a headstrong monarch who has a fatal tendency to charge off into ill-advised foreign adventures. With its setting in ancient Iraq, the epic resonates strongly with contemporary events, and this resonance can certainly be heard in Komunyakaa 's verse. Indeed, at times the men of Uruk sound almost like the war-weary grunts depicted in Komunyakaa's Vietnam-based collection Dien...