--would you say that "both currents" refers to the Bible and the Greek/Latin tradition?
That is how I take it, although the suggestion that the classical tradition is where we get the secular part of the Western canon strikes me as nope.
Have you read Martin West's The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (1997)? You have probably encountered its information in generations of subsequent scholarship, but it was the first really substantive effort to look at the interrelation of classical Greek and ancient Near Eastern literatures and does so with more than just a list of typologies.
(I must have been in college when I encountered the idea that Enkidu was to Gilgamesh as Patroklos to Achilles, a beloved companion/φίλος ἑταῖρος. I can tell because I still have on my hard drive 4000 unfinished words entitled "Gilgamesh, Malcolm, Achilles," datable by internal references to 2001–02 and concerning a man who has lost his lover and is neglecting himself toward suicide in the magical thinking that part of their shared soul went down to the underworld with him; it breaks off at the point where katabasis is suggested. It occurs to me now that that this knot of ideas reworked itself from scratch a couple of years later as "Kouros," although the later story has more Geštinanna going on.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2024-01-25 12:21 am (UTC)That is how I take it, although the suggestion that the classical tradition is where we get the secular part of the Western canon strikes me as nope.
Have you read Martin West's The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (1997)? You have probably encountered its information in generations of subsequent scholarship, but it was the first really substantive effort to look at the interrelation of classical Greek and ancient Near Eastern literatures and does so with more than just a list of typologies.
(I must have been in college when I encountered the idea that Enkidu was to Gilgamesh as Patroklos to Achilles, a beloved companion/φίλος ἑταῖρος. I can tell because I still have on my hard drive 4000 unfinished words entitled "Gilgamesh, Malcolm, Achilles," datable by internal references to 2001–02 and concerning a man who has lost his lover and is neglecting himself toward suicide in the magical thinking that part of their shared soul went down to the underworld with him; it breaks off at the point where katabasis is suggested. It occurs to me now that that this knot of ideas reworked itself from scratch a couple of years later as "Kouros," although the later story has more Geštinanna going on.)