Tablet XII is Canon! Literary elitism and homophobia in translations of Gilgamesh

[radiantfracture]

Herewith the Gilgamesh rant I promised / threatened, jasmine_r_s.

This is kind of an outtake from developing my course materials; I may use some of this as an example of thinking about questions in translation, transmission, editing, and the literature vs. orature divide in epic scholarship, but it is ultimately mostly for my own satisfaction.

I am not a scholar of ancient texts, and this is a bit sketchy as yet; such scholars may feel free to drop in and note my more glaring errors or omissions. (Glances over shoulder at jasmine_r_s and sovay).

Okay.



What is Tablet XII?

Famously, the Standard Version of Gilgamesh is inscribed in cuneiform on twelve clay tablets. Tablets I through XI form one continuous story, the tale we usually think of as the Epic of Gilgamesh (though there are or were many other Gilgamesh stories).

This series contains the familiar narrative. Gilgamesh is a tyrannical king; the gods send Enkidu to fix him; the two buddies run around crashing into things for a while; then the gods get mad and kill Enkidu. Gilgamesh, shattered, goes on a quest for eternal life, fails, and finds solace in his creation of a magnificent city and an epic story. It's beautiful, humane, even existential. I love it.

Tablet XII contains a different story about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. In this story, Enkidu also dies, sort of, and Gilgamesh calls him back from the underworld as a spirit; they have a long conversation about the fates of people in various life situations after death.

The tone is less formal, less grand, maybe more implicitly comic? It may or may not contain a dirty joke about Gilgamesh dropping his junk into the underworld (scholarly opinion is divided).

This Tablet makes literary scholars lose their minds. Let us consider how and why.

What to do with Tablet XII?

To judge by the reactions of European and North American literary scholars, Tablet XII has contact poison rubbed all over its incised face.

Of the four translations of the epic I own, only Sophus Helle (Yale UP 2021) provides Tablet XII, fully translated, in its place after Tablet XI.

Stephen Mitchell (Simon & Schuster 2004) omits Tablet XII entirely; Maureen Gallery Kovacs (Stanford UP 1989) includes an appendix explaining why Tablet XII isn't any good and she isn't going to include it; and Andrew George (Penguin 1999) provides a note in Tablet XII's place in the Standard sequence, explaining why the story has been moved to a different section of the book and subsumed into the translation of another text.

Why Though

The translators give the following reasons for the exclusion of Tablet XII.

The last Tablet in the "Series of Gilgamesh", Tablet XII, is not part of the epic at all, but an Akkadian translation of the latter part of the Sumerian poem of Bilgames and the Netherworld. It was appended to the epic presumably because of the relevance of the material: it describes conditions in the Netherworld, where after his death Gilgamesh presided over the shades of the dead. (George, 1999, p. 100)

This speculation as to the state of mind of the scribe appears in more than one translation. "I am correcting a mysterious error in judgement on the part of the scribe," the reasoning seems to go, "but what on earth led them to this bizarre mistake?"

I have the advantage of knowing some excellent scholars of oral traditions, and of existing several decades' of academic conversation on from Kovacs' 1989 edition, but I find her reasoning even more maddening:

In the standard version, the Epic of Gilgamesh consisted of twelve tablets. Why, then, have I presented only eleven in this translation? The decision to eliminate Tablet XII was a matter of personal judgement, shared by many others, that though Tablet XII may be literally a part of the Epic (the subscript of Tablet XI indicates it has a sequel, and the subscript of Tablet XII identifies it as "Tablet XII" of the Gilgamesh series), it is not part of it in literary terms. (116)

To which I respond: Eh?

Kovacs goes on to give a brief summary of Tablet XII, and then writes:

The tablet is clearly inconsistent with the previous eleven-tablet epic in several ways. First, Enkidu is still alive at the beginning of Tablet XII, though he had already died in Tablet VII. The table is also stylistically at odds with the rest of the Epic .... [it] bears few marks of ... creative adaptation, and lacks any attempt at a logical transition from Tablet XI .... as literature ... it seems the work of a pedestrian spirit, perhaps of a prominent scribe trying to integrate all Gilgamesh traditions .... the attempt was not well executed, and I prefer to rest with the eleven-tablet Epic.(116-17)

It seems extraordinary to me, in a putatively scholarly edition that carefully and usefully notes missing words and uncertain translations line by line, to declare that you left out 1/12 of an ancient text because you didn't think it was very good.

Again, this is an anachronistic (and rhetorical) question to put to the Kovacs of 1989, but is it appropriate to impose late 20th-C ideals of what "good" means on a text, ignoring the context of this scribe and their culture?

But really, Kovacs' long justification seems more like defensive hedging, doesn't it?

Mitchell (2004) is producing a popular edition of the epic, and a "version" rather than a translation -- "I don't read cuneiform and have no knowledge of Akkadian," he notes, so he has "depended on literal translations by seven scholars," including George and Kovacs. His note is brief and parenthetical:

(Like many other translators, I have omitted Tablet XII, which most scholars consider as not belonging to the epic." (65)

The omission makes the most sense in Mitchell, since he is creating an edition for a general readership, not a scholarly compendium. The actions of the academics whose influence he cites are more troubling.

Helle (2021), as noted, does put Tablet XII back into its place, but also adds this note:

The eleven Tablets of the epic were accompanied by a twelfth, an appendix translated directly from an older Sumerian tale. Table XII tells a separate story about the same characters, throwing another light on the theme of death. Here, Enkidu is alive again, apparently a father and a widower.(113)

More rhetoric: is it possible that all four of these scholars, highly knowledgeable and widely read, are sincerely making this basic category error, that one pile of tablets must equal one continuous and consistent story? Since when? By what convention? Who, in short, says?

It doesn't take detailed close reading to recognize that these are two different stories. What about it? None of you have ever seen a sitcom? Heard different versions of a fairy tale? Consulted Winnie the Pooh?

I chatted with jasmine_r_s today about the citational practices of ancient Mesopotamian scribes -- they had many conventions, and used them. That is, they were not transcriptionists: they were scholars, interested in the history of the texts they copied. As Kovacs herself notes, Tablet XII is explicitly marked as a sequel to Tablet XI.

I cannot know why the scribe put these two texts together -- purposefully, ironically, whimsically, mistakenly -- but I know that they did. Both Kovacs and George acknowledge this as meaningful by speculating on the scribe's purpose. Why then, as a later scholar, make the drastic editorial choice of refusing even to translate the final tablet, or moving it to a different section of the book?

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Tablet XII?

My thesis here is that Tablet XII is excluded or sidelined because of an ethnocentric narrative about the genealogy of Great Western Literature, literary elitism, and homophobia.

Graziosi (2005) identifies two lenses through which an ancient epic like Gilgamesh is generally understood within European literary studies: as a precursor to and exemplar for Great Literature, and as a recorded example of an oral tradition.

To be a worthy literary ancestor, Gilgamesh needs to be an ideal work of art, and many of our ideals are still descended from Aristotle's analysis of tragedy (Graziosi). Through the literary lens, this epic can have flaws (indeed should, so that later writers can improve on it) but it should demonstrate an enduring greatness. The prose must be skillful, the conception original, the appeal universal.

You get the drill. There should also be enough parallels to Greek and Roman epics to lump them all together if brevity requires.

I have become sarcastic, but the wider faults of such an approach are -- again, especially to a contemporary reader -- obvious. There is no singular, teleological lineage of story, concluding in its perfection in, say, November of 1910. There are instead many literatures, writers, orators, performers, musicians, scribes, and audiences, all informing and influencing and stealing from and arguing with one another, the culture around them, and their own visions of history and of the future.

The work of Indigenous scholars, writers, and storytellers like Jo-Ann Archibald, Basil Johnston, Lee Maracle, and many other Indigenous and ally thinkers, has provided a much richer way to understand orature than as a precursor to anything. Because these traditions, while violently disrupted by colonialism, are yet continuous, living traditions, the teleology of colonial literary studies is overturned.

Oratures are rich in philosophical discourse and aesthetic practices, but these practices can look and sound different than a fantasized ancestor of Paradise Lost or that domestic epic, Pride and Prejudice. Often, they are accused of not being "good."

The Gilgamesh of the tablets does belong to the past. Its language is no longer spoken, its script famously difficult to decipher. Still, the past did not exist to serve our purposes: it had its own ideas about what was important. Figuring them out seems much more interesting than trying to revise them. (And its present creative influence is not confined to those who made off with the tablets circa 1860-1935.)

All right, you know I am a fan of oral traditions. What about that lens? If we consider Gilgamesh as a transcribed record of an oral tradition, it makes no sense to exclude Tablet XII, no matter how weird it is.

(And no matter how mediated the translation from oral to written may have been. We would include Tablet XII not for aesthetic purity or authenticity, since those things are infinitely contestable, but for completeness. Because it's there.)

If our goal is to do our best to understand how this particular tradition understands the world, then every story is precious. The more stories you can encounter, the more likely you are to gain insight into the aesthetic and narrative values of the culture that produced them. Putting the shorter, folksier, more grotesque story next to the epic illuminates and enriches both.

(I am thinking now of the comic dance that comes after a Shakespearean tragedy. What is that called again?)

However, to include the textual dialogue that our scribe so thoughtfully provided us, and that the later academics would split into high/low, epic/folk, sophisticated/primitive -- this would somewhat spoil the status of the main epic as a work both ancient and extraordinary.

Which it is! But so are many other kinds of stories, including many that get relegated to the deprecated categories of myth, legend, folktale or fairy tale.

(For all we know, the second story was considered aesthetically and philosophically superior to the first because of its brevity and its dick jokes.)

You Said Something About Homophobia Though

I did.

It is difficult to believe that the excision of Tablet XII is not also informed by the presence of a particular section of Enkidu's dialogue. In the Penguin translation, finally excavated on page 194, the passage is vague and innocuous:

[I, the] friend whom you touched so your heart rejoiced,
[my body like an] old garment the lice devour.
[Enkidu, the friend whom you] touched so your heart rejoiced,
[like a crack in the ground] is filled with dust.'

You need pretty good queer reading to make much of that. In Helle (2021), the language is more direct:

"My friend, my penis, which you touched to please your heart,
s being eaten by a moth, like a threadbare cloth.
My friend, my crotch, which you touched to please your heart,
is filled with dust, like a crack in the ground." (117)

In Kovacs and Mitchell, the section is not referred to at all.

In Conclusion

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets I - XI, at least in the fragments we have, is exuberantly sexual and emotional, but can (with some effort) be read as a heterosexual epic where Gilgamesh and Enkidu are just very very good buddies who hug and kiss a lot. (Who knows what's impressed into the missing fragments.) With the inclusion of Tablet XII, the relationship is clearly also sexual.

I think for Kovacs and other translators, the frank sexuality here is wrapped up in the general "vulgarity" of the Tablet, and adds weight to their collective choice to suppress it.

(I am not equipped to evaluate the relative accuracy of the translations from Akkadian. If only Kovacs had provided some further basis for comparison. A shame it was not worth her time.)

It seems to me that homophobia alone cannot explain the amputation of Tablet XII -- especially by Mitchell, publishing in 2004, and himself queer.

Had a well-translated, obviously queer text of Tablet XII been available to Mitchell, would he have included it? (That one's not rhetorical -- I'd like to ask him.)

I think to make sense, the excision needs to be motivated by the larger impulse of a kind of retroactive colonization of the past, in which the Epic of Gilgamesh exists to serve the (English/European, colonial) future's need for a particular kind of narrative ancestor. (And a Biblical precursor, via the Flood story.)

Still, I feel unsatisfied. Like these scholars blinking at the mysterious inclusion of Tablet XII, I gaze at the mysterious gap where Tablet XII should be and wonder -- what were they thinking, to deny us access to this text? In the end, I still cannot quite account for it.

A better knowledge of the particular transmission and translation history of Gilgamesh would be useful to me here. Those with richer knowledge of historical editorial practices may be able to shed some light.

{rf}

Comments

[sovay]

I cannot know why the scribe put these two texts together -- purposefully, ironically, whimsically, mistakenly -- but I know that they did.

Have I already dropped Eckart Frahm's "Nabû-zuqup-kenu, Gilgamesh XII, and the rites of Duʾuzu" (2005) on you? I am biased because (a) I love the idea of the use of the text as ritual, news at eleven (b) it was my first encounter with scholarship on Tablet XII, which incidentally meant I was introduced to Tablet XII as a part of the epic, full stop, and it made sense to me because the Iliad and the Odyssey come embedded in the matrix of the Epic Cycle in which some absolute self-contradictory batshit occurs and classical authors seem to have been fine with it. tl;dr I am persuaded by your theory that part of the problem is the anachronism of a complete and consistent canon.

(I am thinking now of the comic dance that comes after a Shakespearean tragedy. What is that called again?)

Antimasque? After Greek tragedies, it's the satyr play.

(I am not equipped to evaluate the relative accuracy of the translations from Akkadian. If only Kovacs had provided some further basis for comparison. A shame it was not worth her time.)

If provided with the Akkadian of Tablet XII, I can at least tell you if words for dick are in there.

[radiantfracture]

Have I already dropped Eckart Frahm's "Nabû-zuqup-kenu, Gilgamesh XII, and the rites of Duʾuzu" (2005) on you?

I don't think so! Thank you. I think you have mentioned the parallels to Sargon.

It's a beautiful thesis. I love how it points at the cultural work of story. I might, if we make that video (cough) ask you to talk about that...

After Greek tragedies, it's the satyr play.

And do you know how it functions there? I'm interested now in this idea of the comic coda.

[ioplokon]

my non-scholarly opinion is that it's like in wrestling where you'll have a lighthearted dark match after the main event (esp if the babyface lost) to send the crowd home happy.

[radiantfracture]

The way to my heart is through wrestling analogies so thank you.

I'm toying idly with the idea that Tablet XII is sort of like that, some kind of coda, either light or dark -- hard to tell while it's fragmentary. (I *think* the end is missing, though I would need to confirm.)

Further to scholarly dickquest 2024

[radiantfracture]

jasmine_r_s found a book in the Internet Archive she thinks might work -- what form would you need the Akkadian in? Is transliteration what we're looking for?

[larryhammer]

Sing it!

[radiantfracture]

If provided with the Akkadian of Tablet XII, I can at least tell you if words for dick are in there.

Welp now I have a quest

[sovay]

Welp now I have a quest

Hold the phone, I found both volumes of Andrew George's non-Penguin translation of Gilgamesh with the entire second volume composed of the notes. The passage in question is lines 96–99 of Tablet XII. George renders it on p. 732 of Volume I in transliterated Akkadian:

[ib-ri? i/ú-š]á?-⸢ra⸣ ša tal-pu-tu-ma lìb-ba-ka iḫ-du-u
[x x ki-i lu-b]a?-ri la-bi-ri kal-ma-tu e-kal
[ib-ri? u-ru? šá ta]l-pu-tu-ma lìb-ba-ka iḫ-du-u
[ki-i ni-gi-iṣ erṣeti(ki)]ⁱ e-pe-ri ma-li

and then on p. 733 in English:

'[My friend, the] penis that you touched so your heart rejoiced,
grubs devour [(it) . . . like an] old garment.
[My friend, the crotch that you] touched so your heart rejoiced,
it is filled with dust [like a crack in the ground.]'

The notes for lines 96—99 on pp. 902–03 of Volume II read:

"These lines now have to be interpreted in the light of MS rr, the new source for BN 250–3. In the Sumerian it transpires that there Enkidu describes the corruption not of his own body but of the corpse of a woman who had been Gilgameš's sexual partner. The tradition that there were such women is found in the unpublished Ur III fragment IM 70101 = 6N-T 450 (see Chapter 1, fn. 16). The decomposition of her body is symbolized graphically by the decay of her genitals. The new text also shows more clearly than before how the Akkadian translator altered the thrust of the passage in question. While evidently keeping the two lines that frame the passage he adapted BN 251–2 freely, imposing on the text a parallelism not present in the Sumerian, and converting the third-person subject of giš šu bí.in.tag.ga (BN 250), i.e. the owner of the gal₄.la (BN 252–3), into the second person (talputu), i.e. Gilgameš. In this way the Akkadian lines appear at first glance to describe the decomposition of both a male and a female body. It has always been suspected, however, that what Enkidu reports in the translation is the decay of his own corpse and in my view this is still the case. Enkidu had a penis but surely no vulva. Sumerian gal₄.la has three common counterparts in Akkadian, biṣṣūru and qallû, both meaning 'vulva', and ūru, 'crotch'; the last of these is attested as part of a man's body as well as a woman's. In this way it was open to the translator to apply both sets of parallel lines to Enkidu, and that is exactly what I assume was done. In short, the newly revealed explicitness of the Sumerian passage, as reworded in the Akkadian version, is further evidence for the often doubted sexual relationship between Gilgameš and Enkidu."

From p. 987 of Volume II onward are reproduced the tablets used for the text of this translation; you can scroll down and see fig. 142–147 for the cuneiform of Tablet XII of the Standard Babylonian version, of which a whole chunk out of the fragment containing the relevant lines (fig. 145) is busted. It sounds as though earlier translations filled in these lacunae less explicitly, but George argues there is solid textual reason to fill them in with dick. As you can see from the incantation I linked farther down in your comments, the primary Akkadian word for "penis" is ušāru; išaru is another. That accounts for George's emendation of [i/ú-š]á?-⸢ra⸣ in line 96. I am not familiar with MS rr and cannot in any case read Sumerian, so I would need to find someone's published translation in order to see for myself the lines which George is paralleling [edit: gotcha]. I'm still going to leave my conjecture about the potential erotics of heart in place. Any errors introduced in transcription would be ironic and my own.

[radiantfracture]

This is gorgeous scholarship. I am quite overcome. I will respond more sensibly by daylight.

jasmine_r_s also found the full George, but I had not even begun to look at it, and here you have done all this beautiful work.

[sovay]

This is gorgeous scholarship. I am quite overtime. I will respond more sensibly by daylight.

So long as you can use it! You're welcome; I became curious myself.

(dictation murders poetry)

It does not: that was a brilliant transcription error.

[radiantfracture]

So I can't remember exactly who wrote about this now, but I'll try to find it -- there's the whole debate about what, at the beginning of Tablet XII, the terms "pukku" and "mekku" actually refer to -- a bat and ball, as Helle has it, or a stick and hoop, a drum and stick, even (I discover while hunting for the original reference) a game board and piece --

(love the idea that Gilgamesh was actually a tabletop gamer; explains a lot, actually)

--and at least one source suggested that this is a dirty joke along the lines of a sort of punning/analogy "oops I dropped my cock and balls into the underworld"

which I admit holds some appeal

Does that ring any bells?

[ioplokon]

I'm biased by my own formation, but I'm thinking of the big debacle over the Ossian poems and how you go from fragment to epic. And then that takes on a life of its own, running around Europe as basically the forerunner to a dozen National Romantic movements, where the form is frequently altered in translation (other than the initial translation of a couple of the poems, the French tended to fit them into alexandrins and the content of some poems was noticeably changed from edition to edition). Which then sparks the search for local epics/epic heroes (so Vercingétorix, eg) upon which to build the nationalist project. :/

But Gilgamesh was popularized after the time period I've studied a lot, so can't really help you there!!

[radiantfracture]

Which then sparks the search for local epics/epic heroes (so Vercingétorix, eg) upon which to build the nationalist project. :/

Yeah. This is a danger of the epic that I want to address somehow in the course -- all the risks as well as the strengths of a unifying story. Unifying to what end? I'm not sure yet exactly how to approach it. Maybe I need historical examples.

the French tended to fit them into alexandrins

Good point -- translation, especially of poetry, has always been subject to all kinds of interference and noise -- ex. When you put Homer into English, do you keep Greek hexameter, or convert it to the more familiar pentameter? (I'm on the side of hexameter.)

So if I understand the parallel you're making, I agree -- in a way these modern scholars are just doing the same thing, but more stealthily, with philological rationalizations.

[ioplokon]

I'm biased but I think ossianism is really illustrative for this because it becomes a bit of a cypher that the different pre-romanticisms pour themselves into (Ossianism in Europe is probably the text you'd want to look at for that and pretty comprehensive - not just focusing on France, Italy, and Germany but also Russia, the Czech lands, etc...). It's also interesting because it comes into being (purportedly, though I'm generous and assume at least some of the fragments were loose translations/compilations of actual songs/poems) as a bit of "salvage anthropology" like the lais of Marie de France & then just morphs into something totally different. But anyway, in some ways it's really separate from Greek and Latin epic, which were preserved and taught as part of the classical curriculum - you studied them as part of learning the languages in which they were written (vs Ossian the whole point is 1. it wasn't written and 2. no one would know the language soon). As far as I know, Gilgamesh isn't really either of these things. Maybe a "modern" epic vs "classical" or "romantic" (I don't think I believe this, but it would be a very funny argument to make that its reception/cultural life in the Anglosphere is most parallel to Joyce's Ulysses)


Honestly, I'm not entirely sure the parallel I'm making, but yeah - all translation is interpretation; just to what ends?

[edenfalling]

This is fascinating; thank you for sharing!

[radiantfracture]

Thank you for reading!

[yarrowkat]

i love the frank sexuality of the Inanna stories and can well imagine that some of the same sort of bold language is hiding in that redacted Tablet!

[radiantfracture]

Or in all those missing fragments!

Somebody should write those. Like kintsugi for poetry.

I also love that Enkidu is ushered into the human by the erotic.

[yarrowkat]

oh, that would be fun to read. i have always loved that Enkidu is made human by eros, by someone who seems very clearly to be a professional sacred intimate, and that no amount of prudish glossing will make that not be part of the text, it's built in so solidly.

[sabotabby]

Thank you for sharing this. Ahhh it's so interesting.

My memories are probably as fragmented as the tablets themselves, but I remember when we were studying it in high school, it was definitely known that they were gay for each other (else why would Ondaaje have written a genderswapped version where they're lovers) but also definitely Tablet XII was not included. This might have been because high school but also I don't think it was widely available at the time, and certainly my English teacher didn't shy away from explaining the homoerotic subtext in the other bits.

It makes the most sense that this is an oral tradition told by multiple storytellers over time. I can't imagine that it's anything but. Or that its exclusion is anything other than what you argue it is.

[radiantfracture]

Because we were talking about Tablet XII, I wanted to formulate the thorn of my obsession with it more clearly.

it was definitely known that they were gay for each other

Yeah, that's the thing -- this has been in the popular conversation for a long time! I came to it late -- maybe Alberto Manguel's first Massey Lecture (2007) would be where I ran into the idea first? I'd have to go back and listen.

[sabotabby]

I read it between 1995-8 (I don't exactly remember which year we studied it in) and my extremely heterosexual English teacher definitely was familiar with the idea.

[radiantfracture]

Can I just say that I'm a bit jealous you got to read this in high school. I think the oldest thing we had was Chaucer. Was it paired with In the Skin of a Lion or presented historically or what?

[sabotabby]

In fairness my English teacher for most of high school was not a normal guy and this wasn't a normal thing to cover. It was presented with In the Skin of a Lion, which was the actual novel study, and we didn't read the whole thing or anything, just enough to draw parallels and understand the references.

[green_knight]

Fascinating; I now know more about the epic than I did.

Nothing surprises me about 'scholars'. In school, the edition of Macbeth my hated English teacher chose was annotated. On the Witches on the Heath, the authors had the following to say:

"It is a pity that this silly little scene had to be included".

Those words stuck with me, as did the rage I felt.

[radiantfracture]

"It is a pity that this silly little scene had to be included".

I burst out laughing. Now I kind of want to find that edition.

I was going to say "imagine!" but you don't have to -- there it is. Catalyst of the entire narrative lacks what -- documentary feel? sufficient ponderousness? -- for our editor.

[hilarita]

There are some very opinionated editors out there. I'm currently reading some extracts of G. Bernard Shaw's writing on the theatre, and he's definitely got Opinions about Shakespeare. Fortunately (or possibly unfortunately), he didn't edit any of the plays, but his spiritual kin clearly was responsible for that edition of Macbeth.

(Also the witches rock.)

[hilarita]

Ooh, this is very interesting! I've been reading a lot of Shakespeare lately, and it's been interesting to look at the textual histories a bit, particularly for The Taming of the Shrew. A lot of editors of The Shrew have had Views, because there are also editions of a play called The Taming of a Shrew, which is closely related but not considered "as good". In earlier editorial tradition, the two plays were often mashed together to make one play, containing the bits the editor thought most appropriate. In the 21st century, there's been more of an effort to consider them as two separate but closely related plays.

This is relevant because I'd not really appreciated until this readthrough how heavily editors have adjusted Shakespearean texts, in the same way that translators here have largely suppressed or elided Tablet XII. Now translation theory of course has a lot to say about what you include or don't include in a translation, but the consensus really by the late 20th century is you don't leave entire bits out because they're "too weird"; you may largely reinterpret a phrase or sentence, and/or heavily gloss it, to try to convey something to your linguistically (and/or temporally) distant audience. I'm amazed that people as late as 2004 were missing out whole sections. (I did most of my translation theory reading in ~2001.) Is this something that only happens in translations, or is it in the scholarly editions as well? Because obviously if you're translating from Edition X, which omits the Terrible Tablet (TM), you're likely to follow the edition.

I shall have to go and have a look at the translation I've got somewhere, and see what it's done. (I have a feeling it's the 1999 Penguin.)

(For the record, on the Shakespeare side, I think that directors and actors are at liberty to mess around with the text a lot more - it's clear that this a) was happening in the Elizabethan theatre and b) you're trying to produce a version of the play for your context, so you get to make decisions that aren't based on presenting an accurate textual history. Scholarly editions, on the other hand, IMO should include what's there, not what you would like to be there to prop up your pet theory.)

[landofnowhere]

(I am thinking now of the comic dance that comes after a Shakespearean tragedy. What is that called again?)

I recently learned the word "exode" as a result of looking at this historical paper by a mathematician known for his colorful terminology. . It might be one word for what your want?

[jasmine_r_s]

All the delightful/awful anecdotes about editorial attitudes here remind me of that entertaining passage from Byatt's Possession, where the slightly awful/delightful Blackadder composes a footnote:

James Blackadder composed a footnote. He was working on Mummy Possest (1863). He used a pen; he had never learned newer methods; Paola would transfer his script to the glimmering screen of the word-processor. The air smelled of metal, dust, metal-dust and burning plastic.

R. H. Ash attended at least two seances in the house of the famous medium Mrs Hella Lees, who was an early specialist in materialisation, particularly of lost children, and in the touch of dead hands. Mrs Lees was never exposed as a fraud and is still thought of as a pioneer in this field by contemporary spiritualists. (See F. Podmore, Modern Spiritualism, 1902, vol. 2, pp. 134-9.) Whilst there can be no doubt that the poet went to the seances in a spirit of rational enquiry, rather than with any predisposition to believe what he saw, he records the medium's activities with sharp distaste and fear, rather than with simple contempt for chicanery. He also implicitly compares her activities-the false or fictive bringing to life of the dead, with his own poetic activities. For an account (somewhat lurid and imaginative) of these encounters see Cropper, The Great Ventriloquist, pp. 340-4. See also a curious feminist attack on Ash's choice of title by Dr Roanne Wicker, in the Journal of the Sorcières, March 1983. Dr Wicker objects to Ash's use of his title to castigate the "intuitive female" actions of his speaker, Sybilla Silt (an obvious reference to Hella Lees). Mummy Possest is of course a quotation from John Donne, "Love's Alchemy.”

“Hope not for minde in women; at their best/Sweetnesse and wit, they are but Mummy, Possest."

Blackadder looked at all this, and crossed out the adjective "curious" before "feminist attack." He thought about crossing out "somewhat lurid and imaginative" before Cropper's account of the seances. These superfluous adjectives were the traces of his own views, and therefore unnecessary. He contemplated crossing out the references to Cropper and Dr Wicker in their entirety. Much of his writing met this fate. It was set down, depersonalised, and then erased. Much of his time was spent deciding whether or not to erase things. He usually did.

[sylvanfae]

*appreciative applause*

[radiantfracture]

Haha thank you!

[bibliofile]

This post is awesome! in so many ways!

a) Gilgamesh, which I've never read much less studied. b) You get paid to think about this stuff, for real, how cool is that. c) Oooh, historical elision of text for various purposes, always good to know. d) And of course the ensuing discussion of Gilgamesh, and editing, and texts. So much win.

This post caused me to look up the ebooks available to me on Libby/Overdrive,* and the ability to read samples from each book was as usual very helpful. Going for the first 25 pages of any book is an easy way out, and not helpful for checking out fiction to read, but it's great if I want to see the Contents and maybe an introduction.

Robert Silverberg, science fiction author (1984) -- omits XII, no explanation
Stanley Lombardo (Hackett, 2019) -- omits XII, explanation not reached in first 24 pages
David Ferry (1992) -- includes XII
Herbert Mason (originally 1970) -- Contents divides poem into four parts; no mention of original tablets by number
N. K. Sandars (Penguin, revised 1972) -- Includes Tablet XII AFAICT

Which brings to mind that I haven't actually read Gilgamesh, and maybe I should? As an (for weak joke) ur-text? And also LibraryThing is doing an early-texts conversation that it would fit into. Hmm.

* Browsing a library from bed is one of the best parts of living in our ebook future.

[radiantfracture]

Oh my God -- thank you for doing this impressive chunk of research on my behalf! I will certainly credit you in the resulting materials. And now I have to go look at all of these.

Which brings to mind that I haven't actually read Gilgamesh, and maybe I should?

Well, I am biased of course, but I love it.

The Stephen Mitchell translation, for all it omits Tablet XII, is a good and highly accessible version -- he is my favorite translator of poetry. It's a great place to start.

If you want something more accurate (and dirty) the Sophus Helle is, in my opinion, magnificent, but more fragmentary.

[elusis]

I am in no way qualified to make comments about Gilgamesh.

What I will say is that way back in Gilgamesh times, when I was in grad school #1, I took a doctoral-level directing class (even though I was a master's student) and our assignment was to make a reigibuch for a production of our choice. For some reason, I chose "Frogs" by Aristophanes, and decided to not only design all the lighting, sets, costumes, stage directions, etc. (as one does in a reigibuch) but also to read as many English translations as I could find, turn them into a "director's preferred text," and write (totally of my own accord) a whole aside by Xanthias where he takes over the action of the play from his master Dionysus and polls the audience on (IIRC) whether the play should become more silly, more serious, or more scatological. In the "more scatological" version, he and Dionysus would likely have sex, but there would be an argument over who would top whom, and whether they would also top Euripides or just make him watch.

I never got to direct the thing, which I rather think I should have, as the prof (former chair of the department) said it was more than good enough, but the current chair of the department didn't believe in MA students directing and barely felt it was appropriate for PhD students to do so, as we should all be studying Languages in anticipation of our required Language Exam(s). Also he was Very Heterosexual. (Apparently he was rather scandalized by my eventual thesis on Annie Sprinkle but also called it "a real page-turner.")

I had no intention of studying ancient Greek, or using my 6 years of Spanish to develop a specialization in Spanish-language theater (which frankly should have been encouraged via Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, but anyway, that's the grubby southern hemisphere, not lovely Europe; Spain had little modern theatre worth speaking of thanks to Franco, and I had no idea what I was missing until I got into the therapy world and used Boal as part of creating a Dramatherapy for Families course) and my proposal to study clowning as my chosen language, given my other specialization in postmodern performance art, was hardly going to be accepted by a guy who thought so little of Scholars dirtying themselves on stage with actual SCRIPTED plays. So that's part of why I don't have a Theatre PhD (and thank god , in retrospect).

But anyway, I don't know from Gilgamesh but I have deep affection for rescuing the lost queers of history, especially those whom Gatekeepers of Good Taste have attempted to pave over.

[sovay]

and write (totally of my own accord) a whole aside by Xanthias where he takes over the action of the play from his master Dionysus and polls the audience on (IIRC) whether the play should become more silly, more serious, or more scatological.

I do read ancient Greek and that sounds legit Aristophanic to me.

[elusis]

Wow, that's high praise! :)

[sovay]

You need pretty good queer reading to make much of that.

*crashing back into the conversation like Kool-Aid*

Actually, I'm not sure you do: so your heart rejoiced. The erotic incantation read by my first-year Akkadian class was called a heart-lifting incantation, which is an acknowledged euphemism. The invocation of the heart in these lines could hold erotic as well as emotional meaning.

[radiantfracture]

Ah, so all you actually need is some genre context. That's lovely, thank you! I may quote you on that, if you don't mind.

[sovay]

That's lovely, thank you! I may quote you on that, if you don't mind.

Not at all! I read the incantation with Torger Vedeler and learned the name from him.