Unsucky Gilgamesh 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job
I had no idea those lines were in this new translation.
This is the the newest installment of the “Unsucky English Lectures on Gilgamesh.”
Part 1, “On Gilgamesh, and Dangerous Questions,” is here.
[Notes:
This and the next post take a detour from "lecture" to "story-telling." Gilgamesh is still the focus—if you’re short on time, you can just skip the first half of this post and start at the “Now they’re ready for Gilgamesh” section—but the detours about the two David Sedaris and the Stanley Kubric warm-ups I start with actually serve to weave important underlying threads to this whole “adventures in literature” enterprise.
Plus, I want to show with these two posts the ridiculous pressures teachers are under to not offend anyone when trying to teach classic literature. I mean, I experienced and wrote about this in 2008, long before the current Western Culture Wars reached their current boiling point. I shudder to think of what today’s “Still-Chained” Literature teachers are going through. (And if you’re one of them, please share your stories in Comments!)
I'll return to lecture mode in post #4.
Finally, before starting, if interested:
See my history with these “lectures” on the “About” page.
Yes, I’m aware of criticisms of Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh translation.1]
It all started so well…
So you’re in Week Three of your two World Literature classes for those bright-eyed, squeaky-clean ninth-graders.
You spent Week One warming these 14-year-olds up with a couple of fun David Sedaris short stories. “Big Boy” – the story of Sedaris’ epic Easter Sunday struggle to flush someone else’s stuck turd down the toilet, so the person waiting outside the door won’t think it was his – is only a page and a half long, and is suitably light and hilarious for a first read. It’s also the perfect story to trot out the lesson on plot structure.
And schooliness aside, it serves to start the conversation about how real literature finds grist for its alchemical mill everywhere, from the ridiculous to the sublime, and is not the trite moralistic stuff they’ve probably been taught to believe it is in k-8 English classes.2 You close this first leg of the journey by intoning (teachers love to intone, don’t they?):
From the bathroom to the bedroom to the throne of God, literature knows no limits. Get used to it. You’re in high school now.
Sedaris’ “Us and Them” is equally fun but infinitely more subtle, with its narrator making his bad self seem good and his good enemy seem bad, and is another perfect vehicle for trotting out the “unreliable narrator” lesson. At this juncture too, you intone:
“Beware of the authority of the author, kids, in every book you read and speech you hear - including mine.
Suspect the narrator.
This story’s narrator made a fool of you. Worse yet, he made you a hateful fool.
Sedaris showed you that narrator was a hateful ass, but had his narrator tell you that he was the good guy. Sedaris also showed you a good, kind character, but had his narrator tell you this kind person was the bad guy. And every one of you believed the narrator instead of your own eyes.
You followed the bad guy, and joined him in hating the good guy. All because you are suckers who trust the authority of the written word.
Look how dangerous books are, how books can blind you if you don’t think. Sedaris just showed you that books can turn you into hateful followers of hateful writers – while all the while thinking you’re the “good people.”
Can you think of any other books that do that? They surround us. Maybe you’ll notice them after experiencing this story. But you probably won’t.
Learn from it. It’s probably the most important lesson anybody could ever teach you in life, but only a few of you will get that. Learn to see with your eyes, instead of continuing – as all of you did in this story – to see with your ears.”
You don’t tell them that Sedaris, being gay, knows from experience how many bad “good people” find it good to hate good “bad people.” One thing at a time. Almost all of these kids have been conditioned once a week since infancy to hate gays and other types different from them. Let them read more Sedaris on their own for now – they’re all begging to borrow your personal copies – and come to love him as a person first.
Then tell them.
That was all good fun. You like them and they seem to like you. And they’re annotating the margins of what they read, as you require, more than they text message their friends in a year – thinking back at the text, inscribing it with their own interpretations and reactions. Life’s good.
In Week Two, you’re ready to lay the foundations for the chronological survey of (mostly Western) literature you’ve been lucky enough to design from scratch. You’re not yet ready to plunge into mythologies of Gilgamesh, Genesis, Hesiod and Homer, because you want them to write their own myths first – from the imagined perspective of the pre-historic, pre-literate, pre-scientific, and pre-TikTok tribes that originated all those myths in the Stone Age.
The best way you can figure to bring fire to the imaginations of these 14-year-olds is not with an ancient book. Instead, you dim the lights, draw the blinds, fire up the projector, and show them “The Dawn of Man,” that great Darwinistic prelude to that great space-age myth in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The Youtube clip below leaves out about half of it, but it’s a good taste:)
As they watch, you’re driving them crazy by pausing the film, pointing to details and asking questions, probing and pushing.
“What is that? … Exactly! Paleolithic war!”
“And what is that? … Brilliant! The discovery of tools, of technology!”
“And that? Yes, yes, yes – the first murder. ‘Cain and Abel,’ the evolutionary version.”
When it’s done, the lights go up, and you ask them if they understand now why Kubrick is a name to remember. Then, you give them their first major writing assignment of the year: decide on some aspect of the natural or subjective world that you, like the homos in Kubrick, don’t understand, that fills you with maybe wonder, maybe fear, maybe both – but above all, with the need to “explain” it. “Points taken off if any of your explanations are drawn from what was claimed or known in later stages of human history.”
When they turn in the final drafts of their myths, my god are you impressed with their imaginations. Daniel, particularly, blows you away with that scene in which his god reaches into his own mouth, drives his hand down his throat into his chest and withdraws from it a fireball he then flings into the sky – and which has stayed there to this day, giving light to us all. You want to throw a parade for his brilliance, and really don’t care that the grammar is non-standard. He’s Korean, after all. You’ll take broken grammar with perfect imagination over a broken imagination with perfect grammar any day. Broken grammar you can fix.
Now they’re ready for Gilgamesh
You’re so excited you can’t stand it. The Kubrick and the creative mythologizing maybe, just maybe, prepared these young imaginations for the world’s oldest story.
You’d read Gilgamesh yourself in college, maybe a time or two since then, in uninspired translations, but you haven’t read the Mitchell translation from 2004 that your students are reading. You’d ordered it the year before after skimming a copy in the school library. You know Mitchell from other works he translated, and this one looks fine indeed.
You’ll read it for homework just like your students do. It’s a stimulating thing to do anyway.
The first chapter was fun: a “Prelude” that was both an introduction of the hero (with nice rhetorical use of the “delayed subject” to create suspense, using the pronoun “he” for several pages before ever telling us “he” was Gilgamesh), and an ode to that other star of the story, Uruk: the primal city itself.
Good enough, fun, interesting. We’re just warming up.
But, Holy Mother of God, nobody was ready for this…
“Tonight I want you to read Book One,” you tell them. “And be sure to annotate it. I’ll check next class.”
You go home that night and read Book One yourself, just like your students. And just like them, no doubt, you have one of the most unforgettable experiences of your years in school – as a student or teacher.
Because you read about the stuff covered in the last post – Gilgamesh outraging his subjects by helping himself to their brides, the chief god Anu telling the goddess Aruru to solve the problem by creating a double for Gilgamesh “to create balance and bring peace,” and Aruru doing just that by creating the one-third human, two-thirds animal named Enkidu – but you read more, too, that you hadn’t counted on.
It’s all good stuff at first. Finally, this 2004 translation dresses this regal story in the stylish regalia it merits. You’re annotating like a madman:
“Enkidu wild, an animal drinking among gazelles at a watering hole. Shades of Darwin – and Kubrick!”
“Hm. Enkidu as ‘animal rights activist?!’ – he frees animals from traps, saves them from hunter.”
“Hunter goes to Gilgamesh to complain.”
On you scribble. You notice an interesting parallel between Anu and Gilgamesh, and it makes you really admire the Sumerian story-tellers who crafted this story, and wonder at this second piece of evidence of a radically non-punitive and jarringly humanistic response to law-breakers or disturbers of civic order in this old culture.3 Because just like Anu dealt with Gilgamesh’s excesses by setting him up for an experience that will presumably give him the wisdom to outgrow those excesses,4 Gilgamesh reacts to the news about Enkidu with a similarly unexpected twist.
He doesn’t send out a posse to capture or kill the wild man, and he doesn’t gird himself for battle with the wild man himself. Instead, you read, he tells the farmer:
Go to the temple of Ishtar,
ask them for a woman named Shamhat,
one of the priestesses who give their bodies
to any man, in honor of the goddess.
“WTF?!” you annotate in huge letters.
What you read next is intriguing too – but gosh, you can’t help but get a bit uncomfortable imagining your 14-year-olds reading it that night too. Gilgamesh continues:
“Take her into the wilderness.
When the animals are drinking at the waterhole,
tell her to strip off her robe and lie there
naked, ready, with her legs apart.”
Another huge interrobang – ?! – in the margin. A bit more graphic than that Victorian version you read years ago. You’re nervous now, and read on:
“The wild man will approach. Let her use her love-arts.
Nature will take its course, and then
the animals who knew him in the wilderness
will be bewildered, and will leave him forever.”
End of section, you note with relief. Thank goodness.
A few pages later, though, when Shamhat does accompany the farmer to the watering hole, the jitters come again.
Shamhat and the farmer wait for three days, and Enkidu finally comes. “The man was huge and beautiful,” you read. “Deep in Shamhat’s loins / desire stirred….”
Then the bomb drops:
Shamhat stripped off her robe and lay there naked,
with her legs apart, touching herself.
Enkidu saw her and warily approached.
He sniffed at the air. He gazed at her body.
He drew close. Shamhat touched him on the thigh,
touched his penis, and put him inside her.
She used her love-arts, she took his breath
with her kisses, held nothing back, and showed him
what a woman is. For seven days
he stayed erect and made love with her,
until he had had enough.
Undeniably beautiful, wonderfully erotic, but again, nothing like those Victorian versions you read back in the day. And my god, you wonder how you’re going to deal with the lecture tomorrow. Most of the kids go to Sunday school (we’re talking today’s Korea here, where you’ll see more crosses in a city block than you’ll see in all of Alabama). And yeah, you’d already intoned that they’re all “in high school now” and that “from the bathroom to the bedroom to the throne of God” stuff about real literature, but Jesus, we were only three weeks in. And they’re all only freaking fourteen. Gilgamesh had jumped the gun on me!
“Touched his penis, and put him inside her”? – wtf indeed. Interrobang.
Sweat.
Would tomorrow’s lessons be the last day of my career at that school?
Next: The story continues with Lecture 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards
Are you a high school or college student? An English teacher or professor? Just an old-school lover of literature? Please share to your friends. Let’s build a lively community in comment threads!
In the middle of writing the first nine of these here-to-be-finished “lectures,” I became aware that my beloved Stephen Mitchell translation was seen by many scholars as perhaps too free an adaptation. So any Ancient Near East scholars are welcome to weigh in on any problematic ideas based on their expertise—I welcome that due to my own hunger to know more about the fascinating Mesopotamian civilization(s). But regardless, the pleasures of swimming in this very fine translation are too deep to regret now.
“Big Boy” is from the laugh-until-you-bleed Me Talk Pretty One Day.
But “beware the author,” you remind yourself. The story might not reflect the reality of Sumerian life. Yet it still reflects, if nothing else, an intended motif on the part of the poet. These unexpected reactions of Anu and Gilgamesh to troublemakers do clearly share, at root, a belief that experience, not authoritarian “Thou shalt nots” and punishments for disobedience, is the key to self-improvement and social order. And you’re deeply intrigued by this.
that “wtf plot twist” we discussed in the first Gilgamesh essay