The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [21]
9. The Diction of theEpic
In works separated by as great a period of time as that which lies between the Sumerian and the latest Semitic versions of the Gilgamesh Epic there are naturally differences in diction as well as feeling. The ancient writers themselves described the Epic as ‘the Gilgamesh Cycle’, a poem in twelve songs or cantos of about three hundred lines each, inscribed on separate tablets. The Ninevite recension is written in loose rhythmic verse with four beats to a line, while the Old Babylonian has a shorter line with two beats. In spite of its primitive features of repetition and stock epithet the language is not at all naive or primitive; on the contrary it is elaborately wrought. The short Homeric ‘stock epithet’ is sparingly used; the Sun God is ‘glorious’ and Ninsun is ‘wise’, but not invariably, and these epithets are far less frequent than those attached to a Hector or Odysseus. What we have in both the Sumerian and Semitic versions is the word for word repetition of fairly long passages of narrative or conversation, and of elaborate greeting formulae. These are familiar characteristics of oral poetry, tending to assist the task of the reciter, and also to give satisfaction to the audience. A demand for exact repetition of favourite and well-known passages is familiar to every nursery story-teller, along with the fierce disapproval of any deviation, however slight, from the words used when the story was told for the first time. Now, as then, an almost ritual exactitude is required of the reciter and story-teller.
We do not know how long the poem was recited, but the retention of those passages suggests an oral tradition alongside the written. They provide a special problem for the translator, particularly where they come very close together without narrative or emotional compulsion. This applies to the instructions to the hunter on his ruse for the capture of Enkidu, which are given in quick succession by his father, by Gilgamesh, and repeated by him himself. In this case I have compressed (perhaps a reciter would have filled out his material with interpolations). But in the case of the words with which Gilgamesh is greeted by the various characters whom he meets in his search for Utnapishtim, and his long replies, the effect is cumulative; each repetition enhances the sense of weariness, frustration, and obstinate endeavour, and must be retained; or again where repetitions in similar words, with slight variations, increase tension and lead to a climax, as in Gilgamesh’s journey through the mountain. This, when spoken, would have left a powerful impression of time passing, and of the strain of the ordeal, so, though the effect is much diminished in reading, I have only slightly compressed. Indeed, how to express the passage of time appears to have been a considerable difficulty, and this device may have aimed at meeting it, for the same type of repetition occurs wherever a journey has to be described.
A number of the usual devices of poetic embellishment were used, including punning expressions, deliberate ambiguity (this in the Sumerian also), and irony. The simile does not appear often, but when it does it is with good effect. On the whole the descriptions are direct and vivid, like that of the volcano and the storm that precedes the flood. The ‘poetry’ is in the cast of mind which saw sheet lightning on the horizon as gods of the underworld raising their torches above their heads. The language of the Sumerian is different in quality, perhaps in part because it is closer to hymn and liturgy. The Akkadian lament over Enkidu is more elaborately expressed, but the Sumerian lament for Gilgamesh has a nobility and ritual force which the other lacks. We have become so used to the more sophisticated literary versions of myth, that we may be tempted to suspect a ‘poetic’ or ‘literary’ overtone where none exists, reading too much