Gilgamesh: A New English Version
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Free Press. 290 pages, $24.
GILGAMESH IS the first significant work of literature in history—not Western history, but all of history—an epic that was first written down (ca. 2100 BCE) over a thousand years before The Iliad and The Odyssey or the Bible. And it happens to have a strong homoerotic and even homosexual element at its very core, a relationship between two heroes, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The former is king of the Babylonian city of Uruk, a giant among men who’s two-thirds god and uses his power to oppress his longsuffering subjects, mostly through his insistence that all brides submit to him sexually before going to their new husbands; the latter is a kind of proto-man who lives and eats with the animals he tends before being civilized, rendered fully human, through sex with a high priestess and high adventure with the king. The epic is about how Gilgamesh is transformed through his friendship with Enkidu and their journey to the world’s edge, and how he returns to Uruk a better, more humane—and more human—king.
Stephen Mitchell has composed a new translation that seeks to capture the bold directness of the language and the grand scale of the epic’s themes. Dedicated to the author’s wife and sometime collaborator Katie, this is an interpretive translation that endeavors to restore the authentic sense and mood of the text. While not reading cuneiform himself, Mitchell tells us that he relied on seven translations, notably that of A. R. George, along with current scholarship. He sees Gilgamesh as an epic in the full sense, charged with big emotions, written in verse in a language that’s both elevated and concrete, and literally etched in stone on a grand tableau. While other translations are full of ellipses where passages are missing or brackets where the meaning of a word is unclear, Mitchell has filled in the gaps and tried to create a complete and coherent work that strides across the landscape with all the thunder of two giants on a mission. The nature of the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu has been a central question ever since the epic was first discovered (near Mosul, Iraq) and translated in the late 19th century. Because of its relatively recent discovery, this relationship has been spared the layers of obfuscation to which those of, say, Jonathan and David or Achilles and Patroclos have been subjected. Indeed the bond between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is typically compared to these other two friendships that stand out as so exceptional in their respective cultural milieux. In all three cases, the bond is compared to a marriage in which the dominant partner loves his companion “as a woman.” Such a phrase when it occurs in Homer or the Bible seems deliberately artful, as if trying to clue us in on something while leaving open the possibility of a nonsexual interpretation. Such an interpretation seems especially forced in the case of Gilgamesh, which offers no example of a male-female relationship based on either romantic love or friendship. This is not to say that women are treated as mere sex objects in Uruk, for in fact women are held in great reverence—precisely, but not exclusively, for their powers of sexual healing. The city of Uruk, after all, is a place of gleaming copper and earthly delights, of parades and joyful romps with the priestesses of Ishtar. What’s more, Gilgamesh displays none of the prudery of either the ancient Hebrews or the Greeks, whose big books discuss sexual acts using stock phrases or metaphors that leave much to the imagination. Sexual acts involving both Gilgamesh and Enkidu and various women are described in a forthright manner that’s neither blushing nor pornographic. Among the most uninhibited is this scene between Enkidu and the high priestess Shamhat: She stripped off her robe and lay there naked, It’s true that there is no comparably explicit description of sex between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, at least in the main body of the epic—though Mitchell claims that a separate book, Tablet XII, an older myth that he excludes from this version, does include genital contact. This absence is quite understandable, as all the business between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, at least once they leave Uruk and set forth on their quest, is of the grand heroic kind: slaying monsters, taming the forces of nature, wrestling with mortality. Women are completely absent from this heroic dreamworld. It’s really not about the sex. And yet, what’s fascinating is that the two heroes are first introduced to one another in a prophesy that stresses the virility and sexual desirability of the other man. Before meeting Enkidu in the flesh, Gilgamesh receives a prophesy—from his mother, of all people—declaring that the king will receive “a dear friend, a mighty hero”: You will take him in your arms, embrace and caress him Enkidu, too, receives a prophesy from a woman, though in his case it’s closer to a set of instructions, brought to him by the high priestess of love from the temple of Ishtar, Shamhat, with whom Enkidu has just had nonstop sexual intercourse for six days. Shamhat endeavors to lure Enkidu to Uruk by promising: “I will show you Gilgamesh the mighty king./ … You will stand before him and gaze with wonder,/ you will see how handsome, how virile he is,/ how he pulses with erotic power.” Who could resist an offer like that? When the two heroes finally meet, it is in the testosterone-charged context of a wrestling match in which Gilgamesh defeats Enkidu and establishes his dominance, after which the latter, who might be expected to skulk off and vow revenge, salutes smartly and agrees to accompany Gilgamesh on his journey to find and kill the monster Humbaba. So off they go, leaving the safety of high-walled Uruk to embark on what might be seen as an archetypal “quest.” But if the Greeks had Theseus or Jason and the Romans had Æneas, each a solitary demigod embarked on a mission that could only be fulfilled by the hero acting alone, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are a dynamic duo whose every action is carried out together, in perfect harmony. The image of the “double” is used repeatedly to describe the two men; their identities seem to merge as they move toward their destination (the cedar forests of Lebanon). One man becomes fearful in the face of danger, the other calms him down; one has a dream of imminent doom, the other spins it as a good omen; and on they trek. Finally the gloomy omens prove accurate and—not to give away the ending, if that’s possible for a 4,000-year-old story—Enkidu falls ill and dies. The wedding imagery returns when Gilgamesh, beside himself with grief, “veiled Enkidu’s face like a bride’s.” Gilgamesh continues on his journey for a few more books, searching for the key to immortality: he survives a great flood by hitching a ride on a boat, he’s duped out of immortality by a serpent—two stories that have clear echoes in Genesis. But without Enkidu he’s reduced to a mere mortal living by his wits, like Odysseus—still a hero, to be sure, who finds his way home but arrives there empty-handed. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk no longer a god, but a man; only now he will be a great king. By producing a coherent, reader-friendly version of Gilgamesh, Mitchell has performed a tremendous service. At a time when U.S. tanks are literally rolling over the Gates of Babylon and crushing their mosaic floors, it is reassuring to know that someone still cares about preserving the distant past and even bringing it, resoundingly, beautifully, back to life. In a lengthy introduction that’s both informative and wry—at times quite humorous—Mitchell explains why it’s important to know something about this remarkable work that stands at the threshold of civilization itself. First recorded just a thousand years after the invention of writing, Gilgamesh harks back to an older time in human development before civilization had assumed its cloak of artifice and formal style, when the physical world was that much closer at hand, louder, more colorful, hotter to the touch.
with her legs apart, touching herself.
Enkidu saw her and warily approached.
He sniffed the air. He gazed at her body.
He drew close, Shamhat touched him on the thigh,
touched his penis, and put him inside her.
the way a man caresses his wife.
He will be your double, your second self,
a man who is loyal, who will stand at your side
through the greatest dangers. Soon you will meet him,
the companion of your heart. Your dream has said so.”
