Parse with me

[radiantfracture]

If you were to read the following two sentences, the subject being Gilgamesh and its effect on the English literary tradition:

Into a canon based in the Bible and the Greek and Latin classics, a religious and a secular canon with a highly developed culture of reception and interpretation grown up around it, entered a new text that belonged, as it were, in both currents and in neither. It was millennia older than either, with elements in common with each, which unsettled our understanding and gave us a sense of the extending, shadowy backstories of our traditions. (Schmidt 4)

--would you say that "both currents" refers to the Bible and the Greek/Latin tradition?

{rf}

Comments

[juushika]

Yes, to both.

[redbird]

That's probably what's meant, but "both currents" could also plausibly mean "the religious canon, and the secular canon."

[ranunculus]

I would say that the writer needed to learn to write.

[yhlee]

By the end of the first sentence I had forgotten what the hell the first clause was. :]

[edenfalling]

Yes, that is how I would read that passage.

[sovay]

--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.)

[davidgillon]

I'd say both Biblical/Religious and Greek/Latin/Secular, given the English tradition would be Christianity is religious, everything else is myth.

[agoodwinsmith]

When I read it, my assumption was that the "two" were Latin (1) and Greek (2).

[hilarita]

I'd agree that the 2 currents are the Bible current and the Greek/Latin current, though I'd hesitate to call the latter secular.

I think, grammatically, we have
Into (a canon based in the Bible and the Greek and Latin classics,) a religious and a secular canon ... entered a new text that belonged ... in both currents and in neither.

(Parentheses added for clarity, plus ellipses for subordinate clauses that mean we lose track of whatever it was the sentence was about.)
It's not the clearest pair of sentences.