Book Review
The two faces of Gilgamesh

By John Freeman
Special to The Seattle Times

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Although the epic of Gilgamesh dates back to before 1700 B.C., it wasn't discovered by Westerners until 1844. A British surveyor passing through modern-day Iraq on his way to Ceylon inadvertently unearthed a piece of the epic poem in Mosul. The man had paused to join an excavation and wound up finding the palace of Nineveh. In addition to your usual palace loot, the archaeologists exhumed tens of thousands of baked clay tablets covered in wedge-shaped script.

Some 25,000 of these tablets were shipped to the British Museum, where the fragments of Gilgamesh languished for another 30 years. Finally, after being translated and cataloged, the first part of the poem was published in 1876, and since then many more fragments have surfaced. We now know that there were five Sumerian versions of Gilgamesh, an old Babylonian version and, finally, what has been called the standard version, which a poet/priest named Sin-legi-unninni wrote based upon what came before him.

All this goes to show that Gilgamesh is an amalgamation, salvaged and translated from the wreckage of years. In other words, each generation must discover Gilgamesh anew, and if we needed a reminder of this fact, this fall brings a new harvest of interpretations.

"Gilgamesh: A New English Version" by Stephen Mitchell Free Press, 290 pp., $24 "Gilgamesh" by Derrek Hines Anchor Books, 66 pp., $9.95

One of them comes from Stephen Mitchell, the Brooklyn-born translator well-known for his renditions of Rilke, the Psalms and the Book of Job. The other comes from Derrek Hines, a relatively obscure poet from Canada who has taken more liberties with the epic poem and emerged with a radical but alluring new poem of his own.

Different as they may be, their stories stick closely to the original framework. Gilgamesh was an actual king who ruled over the city of Uruk in Babylonia in 2700 B.C. Rich and strong and powerful, Gilgamesh had everything he wanted except immortality. As the story begins, he has begun to terrorize his people, and so the gods send a wild man named Enkidu down to Earth to put Gilgamesh in his place. He is just as strong and powerful as Gilgamesh, but there is one difference: while Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, one-third human, Enkidu is his opposite and has been raised in the wild.

Just as their battle seems poised to become the mother of all Wrestlemanias, it takes a bizarre turn. The two scrap to a draw and become bosom buddies, traveling around the world, slaying monsters and earning glory. Angry at their hubris, the gods condemn Enkidu to the underworld, and once again, Gilgamesh knows the pain of mortality in a more intimate way. He makes a journey to the underworld to conquer death and fails when he cannot even conquer sleep.

Although often described as a great story about the fear of death, Mitchell's version brings to the fore the poem's sensual qualities. I can be certain that the laborious version I read in ninth grade did not describe how, when the woman Shamhat is sent to the wilderness to tame Enkidu, "[f]or seven days/he stayed erect and made love with her,/until he had enough."

Coming Up Stephen Mitchell The author of a new translation of "Gilgamesh" will read at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600; www.elliottbaybook.com).

If this makes you blush, Hines' interpretation of Shamhat — "slouched over a back-street bistro table," skinny and beaten, resembling a street-walking prostitute — can be called downright bawdy. Hines makes up for the grunge with a brisk and slashing wit. "After seven nights of love/as a man might,/Enkidu lost his understanding of animal speech./But it was a fair trade."

Indeed, to read both versions of "Gilgamesh" often means trading one benefit for another. Mitchell's version is especially keen on capturing the almost romantic fervor of Gilgamesh and Enkidu's friendship. "Beloved brother," Enkidu addresses Gilgamesh; "dear friend," is how the King addresses his double. Together they tromp into the forest of Cedars and slay the monster Humbaba. What follows from here feels like an episode from Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings," only with a gorier finale. "They bound logs together and built a raft," Mitchell translates at the end of Book V. "Enkidu steered it down the great river./Gilgamesh carried Humbaba's head."

While Mitchell takes an almost valedictory view of this victory, Hines depicts it with a glancing irony. "The while he was glancing at pretty-boy Enkidu," he writes in the voice of a soldier sent on the "Humbaba Campaign," "You could see that edged glint in their eyes./They got off on it."

Given the recent showdown in Iraq between a local demagogue and a ruler who has his own surfeit of hubris, it's tempting to read "Gilgamesh" as a poem with a moral for today. In an introductory essay, Mitchell argues that "Gilgamesh's quest is too subtle and rich in minute particulars to fit any abstract scheme." But he stops short of forbidding an allegorical reading. After all, the nature of this poem shifts with time. And with their muscular and belligerently haunting renditions, Stephen Mitchell and Derrek Hines have given us a Gilgamesh for our era: a portrait of masculine belligerence, cloven in two.

John Freeman is a writer in New York. His reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union Tribune.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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