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}