Gilgamesh : A New Rendering in English Verse (9 page)

There are places where I have exploited scholarly disagreements. Some scholars think that Ishtar, in Tablet VI, turned Ishullanu into a mole; others think he was turned into a frog. I like both possibilities, so I turned the scholars into ancient gossips whose stories, as usual with gossips, don't quite match. Again, this is an example.

There are also places where I have made decisions neither constrained to do so by gaps nor authorized by scholarly disagreements. I have sometimes used expressions in one tablet whose authority can be found only in another. For example, some warrant for my formulation “Two people, companions, they can prevail” can be found in the literal translations of Tablet IV, but I have used it a number of times elsewhere. I have also sometimes condensed somewhat, sometimes expanded a little, sometimes varied the material locally. For example, the literal accounts of Gilgamesh's journey through the sun's nighttime tunnel repeat the same lines over and over; I have invented variations of them, for narrative purposes and to avoid monotony.

Every translation or version of a work is an interpretation of it, because every choice of expression, every metrical decision, is an act of interpretation, and the “true original” is always unrecoverable, even for the most faithfully literal translation. This is all the more obviously the case when the “translator” is not working directly with the original language. So I do not want to make exaggerated claims about faithfulness. But my version tries to be as respectful of the professional scholarship as it is feasible to be.

There is one matter which might cause confusion for the reader who consults the Speiser translation while reading my version. The small Roman numerals between passages in Speiser refer to columns of the tablet in question. My small Roman numerals represent decisions by me about how best to dispose the episodes of the narrative.

The other constraint I have been working in terms of is the verse medium, iambic pentameter lines arranged in unrhymed couplets. My intention has been to obey the laws of this meter as strictly as I could. There are a few places where the line is stretched perhaps beyond its limit (“There is no withstanding the aura or power of the desire”); a few instances of lines with the predicted first syllable omitted (“utterly the name of Enkidu”); a few instances where—one sentence (or clause) ending in the middle of a line and a new one beginning—the space between them is counted as an unspoken syllable (“‘why should he die?' Angry Enlil said”).

TABLET I

TABLETS II AND III

My rendering here is based mainly on the Speiser translation of Old Babylonian passages. The Assyrian tablets are extremely fragmentary.

TABLETS IV AND V

Tablets IV and V are also fragmentary and the narrative sequence must be pieced together. In my rendering, the dreams occur on the journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the Cedar Forest, and before they arrive there. It seems to me a reasonable arrangement of the narrative. I am relieved to find that this is also the sequence as given in Kovacs (though I had made my own decision before I read her translation). In Speiser, Gardner-Maier, and Sandars, the dreams occur after they have entered the Cedar Forest, though of course before they encounter Huwawa.

Because of the fragmentary condition of the tablets, as reflected in the scholarly translations, there is a good deal of room for local invention, omission, and condensation. For example, there were more dreams recounted on the tablets than I have tried to set forth in detail. The account of the fighting is similarly fragmentary, so there is a good deal of local invention in my rendering.

TABLET VI

This tablet, especially in the dialogues between Ishtar and Gilgamesh and between Ishtar and Anu, is less fragmentary than Tablets II–V. But there is necessarily more invention by me toward the end of the tablet, in the account of the battle with the Bull of Heaven and Gilgamesh's triumphant speech after the battle.

TABLET VII

The first section and the first five couplets of section ii are based on the literal translations of a Hittite tablet.

TABLET VIII

This tablet is very fragmentary. There is a certain amount of local invention in my version, based on what the scholarly translations have put together.

TABLET IX

TABLET X

TABLET XI

GILGAMESH, ENKIDU, AND THE NETHER WORLD

(TABLET XII)

My version of this poem is based on Speiser's translation in
Ancient Near Eastern Texts
and on the translation by John Gardner and John Maier in their
Gilgamesh;
my version of the questions and answers in section iv is based on Samuel Noah Kramer's translation of the corresponding lines in the Sumerian poem, in “Death and Nether World According to the Sumerian Literary Texts,”
Iraq
XX, 67, n. 16.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 1992 by David Ferry

Introduction copyright © 1991 by William L. Moran

All rights reserved

Published in 1992 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First paperback edition, 1993

Tablets I–V first appeared in
TriQuarterly,
a publication of Northwestern University, No. 83 (February 1992). Part of Tablet VI first appeared in
Partisan Review,
LIX, No. 2 (Spring 1992). Tablets VII–IX first appeared in
Raritan: A Quarterly Review,
XI, No. 4 (Spring 1992). Tablets X–XI first appeared in
Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics,
at Boston University, Third Series, I, No. 3 (Fall 1991).

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Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52383-1

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-52383-5

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First eBook edition: October 2014