The world's first story.

Miller, John J.

Derrek Hines, translator Gilgamesh. Anchor Books, 66 pages, $9.95

Stephen Mitchell, translator Gilgamesh: A New English Version. The Free Press, 290 pages, $24.00

About a century and a half ago, the name "Gilgamesh" meant nothing to the ordinary person--or even to the ordinary educated person. It was simply unknown. In the 1840s, however, an Englishman whose head was filled with exotic visions from A Thousand and One Nights began excavating at an archaeological site in what is now Iraq. Austen Henry Layard unearthed a trove of clay tablets full of strange wedge-shaped markings. He understood this to be a form of ancient writing and shipped thousands of the tablets to the British Museum, where Henry Rawlinson struggled to decipher them. Rawlinson's breakthrough arrived in the 1860s, when he became the first man in several millennia to comprehend cuneiform. A few years later, one of his assistants, an earnest young fellow named George Smith, studied a few neglected tablets. What he read on them electrified the world.

At a meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology in 1872, Smith recounted the story of a long-forgotten king who was ordered by the gods to build a great ship, load it with animals, and batten down the hatches for a deluge lasting six days and seven nights. Sound familiar? Here was the story of the Flood, told on a tablet older than the Old Testament. The Noah figure even sends forth a series of birds from his ark to search for dry land. It is hard to believe the two stories are not connected.

Yet Smith's rendition of the Flood was maddeningly incomplete. "I must notice that in various places the tablets are broken and the texts defective" he explained in his lecture. They were full enough, however, to generate an enormous amount of excitement in the public. Within a few weeks, the Daily Telegraph offered 1,000 guineas to anyone who could locate the missing portions of the text. Smith himself accepted the challenge, journeyed to Iraq, and began digging. Fortune--or one might say providence--smiled upon him. Whereas some men have wasted whole lives searching for El Dorado or the Holy Grail, Smith found what he was looking for in a few days. And what he turned up was the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Since then, Gilgamesh has entered the record books as the world's first known example of true literature. For most people, it remains little more than the answer to a trivia question. Maybe they once had a professor of classics who casually remarked at the beginning of the semester that something predates the Iliad. A smaller number perhaps have been made to read Gilgamesh in a college survey course. The original contains just enough sexually explicit material to keep it off most high school reading lists--though sanitized versions are readily available for kids, including a trilogy of attractive picture books by Ludmilla Zeman and a single volume for a slightly older set by Geraldine McCaughrean. Despite these impediments, a number of readers have found the experience of reading the long-lost epic revelatory. "Gilgamesh is overwhelming" wrote Rainer Maria Rilke, "and I consider it the greatest thing one can experience."

Today, the Gilgamesh poem is perhaps seven-tenths complete and spread across twelve cuneiform tablets, which are preserved in various conditions. The portion describing the Flood--the object of so much early attention--is almost entirely readable. But large chunks of other parts are either gone forever or remain buried in the sands of Iraq, awaiting their own George Smith. We do know quite a bit more about the epic today than Smith did in his time. There seems to have been a real king named Gilgamesh who ruled between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers more than 4,000 years ago. Following his death, he became a Hercules-like figure in Sumerian folklore and the subject of several heroic poems. Within a few centuries, these were combined to form a single tale. Roughly 3,000 years ago, a Babylonian scribe named Sin-leqi-unninni revised the poem into a standard version that forms the basis of most modern translations. This critical text owes its survival to Assurbanipal, an Assyrian king who ruled in the seventh century B.C. He had not only the imperial ambition to conquer his neighbors but also the intellectual curiosity to collect their writings in a great library at Nineveh. New fragments surface every so often, and each one holds the potential to cast new light on the bygone epic.

What makes the poem interesting is the character of Gilgamesh. He is not merely a hero, but a tragic hero who refuses to accept his own mortality. No plot summary can do the poem justice, but in essence Gilgamesh befriends a rival, Enkidu, and the two companions embark on a quest to slay the forest monster Humbaba. They accomplish this feat, but at the cost of angering a god who demands Enkidu's life. After Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh falls into a fit of despair and sets out on another adventure to learn how he might escape death and live forever. He ultimately encounters Utnapishtim, the Noah figure who tells the story of the Flood and informs Gilgamesh that mortals must perish. Gilgamesh is not pleased at this news, but he seems to accept it as he returns to his city. As a piece of literature, Gilgamesh is the compelling effort of an early civilization to grapple with fundamental questions of the human condition. It speaks to all of us, even now.

A handful of very good versions of the story are available, and in several forms. These include a prose adaptation by N. K. Sandars, a free verse interpretation by Herbert Mason, and an iambic pentameter poem by David Ferry. None is a strict translation, because there can be no such thing. The original language is simply too alien and, more importantly, the text is damaged or missing in too many places to permit a seamless narrative. An almost word-for-word rendering by John Gardner and John Maier is full of brackets and ellipses; many passages are barely coherent. Complicating matters further, the universe of scholars who can actually read cuneiform is extremely small. The website for the International Congress of Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology lists only a few hundred members--and the number of these members who can transform the original into serviceable English, to say nothing of poetic English, is smaller still. That's why most of the successful translators (including each of those mentioned above) can't even read the original tablets at all. Their acknowledgments always confess deep debts to the philologists who can.

Derrek Hines, a Canadian poet now living in Cornwall, continues this practice in his new edition of Gilgamesh, which he insists is "an interpretation" and "in no sense a translation." This admission is perhaps the only way in which his free-verse poem is conventional. By its third line, which describes the hero's "zeppelin ego" readers who know that Gilgamesh never laid eyes on a zeppelin realize they're in for a jarring experience. The language is always evocative, often vulgar, and cluttered with deliberate anachronisms. Every now and then, a phrase really works: Hines describes the wrathful goddess Ishtar raising Gilgamesh "on the meat hook of her ire." Perhaps the Sumerians did not have meat hooks--I have no idea--but it's a powerful image that succinctly captures the ancient Mesopotamian view of how the fickle deities viewed humans who irritated them. It is not, to say the least, a Judeo-Christian perspective. Even the zeppelin reference is perhaps defensible: Gilgamesh does in fact possess a zeppelin-sized ego, and by the end of the tale it's going to suffer a zeppelin-like catastrophe.

The clever use of anachronisms can even suggest timelessness--a work of art that speaks to the ages, such as a performance of Shakespeare in which Hamlet wears a suit rather than a codpiece. Hines, however, seems to deploy anachronisms simply for the sake of deploying them: he refers to the Empire State Building, Swiss bank accounts, paparazzi, the Rubik's Cube, and The Wizard of Oz. The result is perhaps the weirdest version of Gilgamesh now on the shelf--and a deeply unsatisfying one not only for its bizarre allusions but also for its other editorial decisions, such as omitting the story of the Flood.

The original Gilgamesh tablets create both problems and opportunities for Hines and his fellow interpreters: Problems became important sections are damaged and therefore missing, and opportunities because these gaps grant artistic license. In another new version--"a loose, noniambic, nonalliterative tetrameter" (as used in Eliot's Four Quartets)--Stephen Mitchell turns Shiduri, a female tavern keeper, into a moral centerpiece of the poem. This choice is less bold than it may seem on first glance. Rather than inventing her speech on human mortality, he restores it from a version of the poem that is more ancient than Sin-leqi-unninni, who either cut Shiduri's remarks or didn't have access to the same sources as today's scholars. Mitchell is not the first to resurrect them. Mason, for instance, grants Shiduri a few extra lines: The gods gave death to man and kept life for Themselves. That is the only way it is. Cherish your rests; the children you might have; You are a thing that carries so much tiredness.

Mitchell expands the speech, and by doing so calls additional attention to it. His Shiduri is perhaps guilty of uttering platitudes worthy of Polonius, but her words overflow with the common sense that Gilgamesh so desperately needs to acquire: Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed. But until the end comes, enjoy your life, spend it in happiness, not despair. Savor your food, make each of your days a delight, bathe and anoint yourself, wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean, let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace. That is the best way for a man to live.

This is good advice for anybody, and especially anybody with a zeppelin ego.

Unfortunately, not all of Mitchell's choices are so judicious. His introduction is enormously annoying, as it wades into a marsh of lit-crit nonsense. He labels Enkidu "the original Greenpeace activist." He calls Gilgamesh and Enkidu closeted gays, apparently because he believes all close male friendships must harbor a homoerotic element. Finally, he informs us that if only the Bush administration had been more familiar with the wisdom of the poem, we might have been spared that unjust invasion of Iraq. It seems that Mitchell counts Sin-leqi-unninni as one of those "poets against the war."

Mitchell bases his provocative claim about modern Iraq on the portion of the poem describing the efforts of Gilgamesh and Enkidu to fight Humbaba, the forest monster. (Writes Mitchell: "Having a monster or two around to guard our national forests from corporate and other predators wouldn't be such a bad thing.") On the original tablets, these sections are badly damaged--they represent the parts about which scholars and interpreters can say the least. Yet Mitchell insists that the key to the meaning of Gilgamesh lies in these lines. "I love how the poet morally situated his poem so that as soon as we are tempted to take a position about good and evil, we realize that there is an opposite and equally valid position," writes Mitchell. "It is all too easy to see ourselves as fighting on God's side, to identify our ideology with what is best for the world and use it to justify crusades, pogroms, or preemptive attacks."

Talk about anachronisms! Mitchell wants the poem to reflect the moral relativism of our own day, even though it comes from the same culture that invented the Code of Hammurabi and its rigid principle of lex talionis. Other interpreters have not fallen into this trap. Ferry, for instance, recognizes that Gilgamesh and Enkidu hope to achieve personal glory by engaging in deadly combat against Humbaba. But he also portrays Humbaba as an evil demon worth destroying. There is nothing too complicated about it: There is no opposite and equally valid position, and there is certainly no left-wing sermonizing about U.S. foreign policy.

It's a shame that Mitchell lets these contemporary blinders mar what is in many ways a fine rendition of Gilgamesh. He is a capable translator and his footnotes are fascinating. Readers who skip his editorializing at the start of the book and dive right into the poem itself will receive a perfectly good introduction to the oldest story in the world. Those who continue to explore the epic eventually will develop their own personal preferences among the many editions of Gilgamesh. My own run in this direction: For context-setting, Andrew George followed by Sandars; for the poem itself, Ferry; and for a detailed look at the sorts of decisions modern interpreters must make, Gardner and Maier followed by Mitchell.

At the end of Gilgamesh--everybody's Gilgamesh--the hero comes up short in his quest to live forever. He returns to his city, where he eventually must die and will be forgotten. This, in fact, is similar to what really happened: The legend of Gilgamesh was lost. The West did not consciously imbibe the heritage of Babylon, Nineveh, and Uruk, as it did the heritage of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. Yet the hard work of diggers like Layard, decrypters like Rawlinson, and combinations of the two like Smith have allowed the West to recover much of Mesopotamian civilization. What was lost became found. It turns out that Gilgamesh did not die; he merely went into hibernation. Now he is with us once more--if not precisely as an immortal, then at least as a man whose story is still worth reading.