Mês: novembro 2019

BECKMAN, G. The Hittite Gilgamesh. Atlanta, GA: Lockwood Press, 2019, 112 p. – ISBN 9781948488068

A tradição de Gilgámesh foi importada para Hattusa, no império hitita, para uso na instrução dos escribas, e tem sido de particular importância para os estudiosos modernos na reconstrução da epopeia e na análise de seu desenvolvimento. Além dos textos na língua hitita que narram as aventuras de Gilgámesh, duas versões em acádico e fragmentos em hurrita foram encontrados na capital hitita Hattusa. Este livro oferece uma edição completa dos manuscritos de Hattusa em hitita, acádico e hurrita.

O autor explica na introdução do livro:

From the late third millennium BCE on, the adventures of Gilgamesh were well known throughout Babylonia and Assyria, and the discovery of fragmentary Akkadian-language fragments of versions of his tale at Boğazköy (edited here), Ugarit (Arnaud 2007: 130–38; George 2007), Emar (Arnaud 1985: 328; 1987: 383–84 n. 781), and Megiddo in Palestine (Goetze and Levy 1959) demonstrates that tales of the hero’s exploits had reached the periphery of the cuneiform world already in the Late Bronze Age.

In addition to the manuscripts in the Hittite language recounting Gilgamesh’s adventures, two Akkadian versions and fragmentary Hurrian renderings have turned up at the Hittite capital Hattusa. But there is absolutely no evidence that the hero of Uruk was familiar to the Hittite in the street. No representations of Gilgamesh are to be found in the corpus of Hittite art, nor are there allusions to him or his exploits in texts outside of the literary products just listed.

It seems, therefore, that the Gilgamesh tradition was imported to Hattusa solely for use in scribal instruction, although it cannot absolutely be excluded that the Hittite-language text was read aloud at court for the entertainment of the king and his associates. Nonetheless, as has long been recognized, the material from Boğazköy has been of particular importance to modern scholars in reconstructing the epic and analyzing its development, since it documents a period in the history of the narrative’s progressive restructuring and elaboration for which very few textual witnesses have yet been recovered from Mesopotamia itself. And it is this very Middle Babylonian or Kassite period to which scholarly consensus assigns the composition of the final, “canonical,” version of the epic.

Gary Beckman is George C. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Cultures in the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan.

SCHMIDT, M. Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019, 192 p. – ISBN 9780691195247.

Neste livro Michael Schmidt discute o fascínio especial que a epopeia de Gilgámesh exerce sobre os poetas contemporâneos, argumentando que parte de seu apelo é sua cativante alteridade. Ele reflete sobre o trabalho de importantes poetas, como Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky e Yusef Komunyakaa, cujos encontros com o poema são reveladores.

Gilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist. It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it tells the story of a great king, his heroism, and his eventual defeat. It is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Acclaimed literary historian Michael Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today.

Schmidt describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis. Incised on clay tablets, its fragments were scattered across a huge expanse of desert when it was recovered in the nineteenth century. The poem had to be reassembled, its languages deciphered. The discovery of a pre-Noah flood story was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, and the poem’s allure only continues to grow as additional cuneiform tablets come to light. Its translation, interpretation, and integration are ongoing.

In this illuminating book, Schmidt discusses the special fascination Gilgamesh holds for contemporary poets, arguing that part of its appeal is its captivating otherness. He reflects on the work of leading poets such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose own encounters with the poem are revelatory, and he reads its many translations and editions to bring it vividly to life for readers.

Ele diz, no Prefácio do livro, que fez, por escrito, 5 perguntas para 50 poetas do mundo de língua inglesa sobre sua relação com a epopeia de Gilgámesh.

1. Quando foi que você encontrou o poema e em qual tradução, ou qual adaptação e meio?

2. Qual é atualmente sua tradução ou versão preferida?

3. Você se lembra da sua impressão inicial do poema? Que relação você tem com ele quando escreve ou planeja escrever?

4. Você o coloca, em sua biblioteca física ou mental, em uma prateleira com épicos e escrituras, em outra prateleira ou em nenhuma prateleira?

5. Gilgámesh é um elemento de informação em seu processo criativo e crítico?

I wrote to fifty poets across the Anglophone world and asked them five questions about Gilgamesh. It is hard to frame questions that do not prompt specific answers and reveal more about the questioner than the poem. I wanted the poem to pose its questions.

1. When do you first remember encountering the poem and in which translation (or which adaptation and medium)? [What mattered was the first remembered encounter, the real engagement. It might have come not by textual means but via the collages of Anselm Kiefer, or a surprising episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation, or via oratorios, operas or animations.]

2. Which is now your preferred translation or version?

3. Do you recall your initial impression of the poem? What residual relationship do you have with it in your own writing and thinking about writing? [Men and women responded very differently, almost as though the material of the poem is fundamentally gendered; and unless the reader is able to engage with the textures of the language or to historicise response, the narrative can alienate anyone impatient with heroes and dragons.]

4. Do you place it, in your literal or mental library, on a shelf with epics, with scripture, on another shelf (which?), or on no shelf at all?

5. Is Gilgamesh an informing element in your imaginative and critical being, or ‘being’, and if so, in what ways?

Most respondents first read the poem in N. K. Sandars’s prose translation, the original Penguin Classics version. Dick Davis, the poet and major Persian translator, describes it: ‘the prose of [her] version is quasi King James Bible English, loosened but recognizably on that model, and I have always been a sucker for prose like this, and this was/is an added reason it has remained my preferred version, even though I am aware that this is a rather dubiously appropriate model.’ Some of those reared on Sandars have gone on to other preferences. But there is something to be said for a prose version first time round: it gives the narrative clearly, without the distraction of gaps and fissures. It does, however, pose other problems.

This book recounts some of the stories surrounding Gilgamesh. It looks at the work itself and tries to read it without the back-projections that mar so much reading, the belief that ‘they’ were like an earlier version of ‘us’, and their concerns were in some way prototypes of ours. The otherness of Gilgamesh is what this book tries to be about, though the habits of the age infect the author, who is in the first degree guilty, being—like most of the poem’s would-be translators—unable to read the work in any of its original languages.

Michael Schmidt is a literary historian, poet, novelist, translator, and anthologist as well as an editor and publisher. His books include The Novel: A Biography and The First Poets. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an OBE in 2006 for services to poetry and higher education. He lives in Manchester, England. Twitter @4Michael7

Um artigo:

The Influence of Gilgamesh on the Bible – By Louise M. Pryke – The Bible and Interpretation: November 2019

Existem apenas algumas referências não cuneiformes a Gilgámesh. A narrativa do dilúvio da epopeia de Gilgamesh continua sendo a conexão mais evidente entre a Bíblia Hebraica e a narrativa épica da Mesopotâmia, um século e meio depois de George Smith tê-la notado pela primeira vez. A narrativa do dilúvio no texto bíblico não é, no entanto, o único ponto de contato entre as duas obras da literatura antiga. O nome do herói da epopeia de Gilgámesh pode ser encontrado em um texto dos Manuscritos do Mar Morto conhecido como O Livro dos Gigantes.

There are only a handful of non-cuneiform references to Gilgamesh. The Flood narrative from the Gilgamesh Epic remains the most overt connection between the Hebrew Bible and the Mesopotamian epic narrative, some hundred years after it was first noted by George Smith. The Flood narrative within the biblical text is not, however, the only point of contact between the two works of ancient literature. The name of the heroic protagonist of the Gilgamesh Epic may be found in a text from the Dead Sea Scrolls known as The Book of Giants.

Um livro:

PRYKE, L. M. Gilgamesh. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019, 256 p. – ISBN 9781138860698

Gilgamesh focuses on the eponymous hero of the world’s oldest epic and his legendary adventures. However, it also goes further and examines the significance of the story’s Ancient Near Eastern context, and what it tells us about notions of kingship, animality, and the natures of mortality and immortality.

In this volume, Louise M. Pryke provides a unique perspective to consider many foundational aspects of Mesopotamian life, such as the significance of love and family, the conceptualisation of life and death, and the role of religious observance. The final chapter assesses the powerful influence of Gilgamesh on later works of ancient literature, from the Hebrew Bible, to the Odyssey, to The Tales of the Arabian Nights, and his reception through to the modern era.

Gilgamesh is an invaluable tool for anyone seeking to understand this fascinating figure, and more broadly, the relevance of Near Eastern myth in the classical world and beyond.

Louise M. Pryke is a Lecturer for the Languages and Literature of Ancient Israel at Macquarie University, Australia, and a Research Associate at the University of Sydney. Gilgamesh is her second volume in the Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World series. Her first book for the series, Ishtar, explored the world’s first goddess of love.