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| I imagined that you would look like a god. But you look like me, you are not any different. |
“He who saw the Deep” is a translation of the standard version’s title, taken from the first line of the poem, but probably not the one any of us are familiar with. Gilgamesh slots it better into the tradition we understand, much like The Odyssey is about Odysseus, The Iliad is about the Trojan War (Ilium being another name of Troy), The Aeneid is about Aeneas... And much like those, the version we have today, and the version being considered today, is all about Gilgamesh himself.
The earliest story recorded on clay tablets, baked in buried, and dug up thousands of years later. A story which is remarkable in itself for being a story at all, as the vast majority of written texts it was found alongside were prayers and records. An epic story we have cobbled together from multiple versions of multiple stories written over two thousand years, and excavated another two thousand years after that. All about a king and his best friend and a flood and what the king brought back after looking at the darkness.
Said synthesis is not unlike that undertaken by adaptor Stephen Mitchell himself, who does not speak Sumerian (he “only” speaks Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, English, and Danish), but instead synthesized the various versions already in existence into this poem. This is not at uncommon: Ezra Pound did the same, for example. Mitchell was understandably criticized for taking some liberties with the text, though why, precisely, yet another academic translation of the poem would be a necessary addition to the canon is a question rarely considered by critics. The work done by Andrew George is among the most comprehensive ever done by any academic, and his two volume analysis and translation of every existent fragment is unlikely to ever be surpassed in English. It is not as if Mitchell isn’t completely up front about his method and his intentions in his introduction. It’s subtitled “A New English Version”, not “A Translation”, after all. He was writing a shorter, accessible version for the public, not a thousand page academic treatise. (It should be noted that George did publish his own shorter, popular translation of the poem, which came out a few years before his massive academic one.)
The other main criticism, completely justified, is that Mitchell makes Gilgamesh into an epic hero in the mold of Odysseus or Achilles, hacks the poem up as if it were a Greek epic, and utterly mangles the distinctly Babylonian flavor of the tale. But, as mentioned above, the most remarkable things about the poem is that it exists at all: the area barely produced any poetry, let alone hero stories. The vast, overwhelming majority of written documents we have from the area are either prayer tablets or dry historical records. They did not seem to be a people given to fanciful tales; they recorded what happened to their kings, and they recorded their entreaties to their gods. And yet here we have a hero story, not quite history, not quite fantasy, but also much too fantastic and narrative compared to the record of events that make up most of the other kingly documents.
And then, we must consider which Gilgamesh would be best? How many gaps in the damaged tablets need to be filled? Or should we publish with all the lacunae left in, 100% fidelity to the tablet, with no consideration to readability? Which tablets have priority over others? Sîn-lēqi-unninni’s Akkadian version is considered the most authoritative, but his twelve volume version was assembled at least 900 years after the earliest surviving five Sumerian poems, each an independent and unconnected adventure. So what Mitchell has given us is yet another version of the story. New wine mixed from the old vintages bottles, to mangle the saying. And despite the message of parable, no reason we can’t wash and reuse the bottles too. these days. Ours are made of glass, not leather. Same with patching up an old garment with new cloth, if you know what you’re doing with preshrunk cotton or wool, but at that point, we’re perhaps being a bit too literal, given the condition of the documents we’re working with, aren’t we?
So what’s the story? Gilgamesh, two thirds god, one third man, is a shitty king who oppresses his people, raping the women and doing something to the men (perhaps exhausting them via athletic games, the tablets are damaged). The gods punish him by sending an animalistic badass to punish him. He appears in the forest and starts bothering the hunters. They ask their lady friend the priestess Shamhat what to do: she says to get the new guy laid, so he’ll become human, and she volunteers. Enkidu becomes civilized, and ends up a nightwatchman, and interrupts Gilgamesh for taking his droit du seigneur with a newly married woman. Gilgamesh, can’t beat the new guy, Enkidu, up. They fight to a stalemate. Afterwards, the two guys become the best of friends, perhaps lovers also. They pal around, beating up monsters and smashing down evil goddesses, until Enkidu dies of a mysterious illness, the curse for having killed the monster Humbaba. Gilgamesh sinks into a deep depression. He goes off to seek meaning and eternal life, which proves to be a dangerous adventure in its own right. He meets the oldest man, from before the Great Flood, who tells Gilgamesh of the creation and the world and the gods. But Gilgamesh messes up getting the magic flower back home -- it is eaten by a snake, which sheds its skin and is reborn. Eternal life is lost to him and his people, and Gilgamesh must live with this and move on. He must accept the reality of death, no matter how powerful he is. As he sees the walls of the city, he weeps, realizing that though he may die, the city will live on, and he should live, regardless of what may happen tomorrow -- the lesson the ferryman tried to teach him before he crossed the river of death earlier in the story.
A remarkably complex and multilayered story, with even more episodes than I have mentioned in the brief summary, all of which are ripe for interpretation and analysis, and which bristling with mythic resonance and epic deeds writ large. Books and books have been written about it since its rediscovery in the 1850s. Every element feels familiar, because we’ve seen all of them before. For an old story, it is a familiar one. And yet it is the example we are familiar with that come later, not this tale.
Is there a definitive, authoritative, “correct” version of the story? Of course not. There are definitive translations of particular versions, but the idea that one version of Gilgamesh is the exact right one is ridiculous. He was a heroic figure who learns to be civilized, to act correctly in society, to rule as one ought to rule, and many tales were told of his adventures. They are all true, in some sense, whether turned into a baseball satire or a science fiction horror anime.
And that same searching for the definitive, the final, the “correct” version of the story, brings us to...
