The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous Page B

waves) there is still the Sumerian Country of the Living, the Cedar Forest and the Silver Mountain, Amanus, Elam, Lebanon. These are stories of folklore and romance which run back from the medieval courts through Celtic legend and minstrelsy to archaic Sumer, and perhaps further, to the very beginning of story-telling. Although the Sumerian hero is not an older Odysseus, nor Heracles, nor Samson, nor Dermot, nor Gawain, yet it is possible that none of these would be remembered in the way he is if the story of Gilgamesh had never been told.
    Today ours is a world as violent and unpredictable as that of Assurbanipal, the king of Assyria, the Great King, king of the World, and of Nahum of Judea, and even of the historical Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, who made war and sent out expeditions in the third millennium before Christ. The difference is only that for us the ‘swirling stream of Ocean’ lies not over the rim of a flat horizon, but at the end of our telescopes, in the darkness they cannot penetrate, where the eye and its mechanical extensions turn back. Our world may be infinitely larger, but it still ends in the abyss, the upper and nether waters of our ignorance. For us the same demons lie in wait, ‘the Devil in the clock‘, and in the end we come back to the place from which we set out, like Gilgamesh who ‘went a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, and returning engraved on a stone the whole story’.

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