A Recently Discovered Gilgamesh Shard Verse Translation
Pleased to share my verse translation of a recently discovered Gilgamesh shard. The translation can be found on The Society of Classical Poets website (the nation’s foremost poetry journal) and here below. The cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) shard ads significant details to the epic. 1. A description of Lebanon’s cedar forest. 2. Enkidu’s observation of the forest’s destruction.
In 2011 when we were evacuating Iraq, looted antiquities entered the market. One such was this shard which features 20 partial lines of Gilgamesh, likely inscribed before the Seventh Century B.C. Verse translation “I” occurs early in the epic. Verse translation “II” occurs slightly farther on. Together the translations bracket a notion of civilization, “wildness and taming”.
Because incomplete, because versions of Gilgamesh differ in particulars, and because cuneiform writing allows broad, sometimes divergent interpretations, there is not a single definitive version of the epic. Then too, this recent Kurdistan text (Neo-Babylonian) follows the more ancient texts from Uruk (Late Babylonian) and Ninevah (Assyrian).
Three characters worth noting. The anthropomorphic giant, Humbaba, who spawns the forest’s “demon-trees” that he rules and guards. Enkidu is an anthropomorphic man, companion friend of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is Sumerian, possibly an actual king of Uruk (2900–2350 B.C.) whose legends are recorded in five surviving cuneiform documents that together form the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Between these translated episodes, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay the Bull of Heaven. Enkidu for his part in the slaying is condemned to death. Because Gilgamesh witnesses his friend’s mortality, he seeks immortality, unsuccessfully, and becomes resigned to death. That the span of the epic.
I’ve inserted two details which resolve the translations into a poetic whole. Enkidu is inserted into “I” and Enkidu’s physical characteristics are inserted into “II”.
I.
A bird begins to sing and soon
Answers echo through the forest,
Some in and others out of tune
Join the merry dinning chorus.
A pigeon moans, a wood dove coos,
A cricket crickets on a leaf,
A stork exults, a booby boos,
Monkey youngsters at mothers shriek.
The cedars sway in Lebanon,
The drummers drum and horns hurrah,
A weary Enkidu does yawn
Before the mass of great Humbaba.
II.
Bull tailed Enkidu opened his man-mouth
To speak these words to Gilgamesh, “My friend,
We have reduced the fertile forest to
Wasteland. How to tell Enlil in Nippur
That hero-like you slew his guardian.
My friend, what was that all-consuming wrath
That trampled down the trembling forest?”
Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet V, Gilgamesh Shard Verse Translation
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Gilgamesh Shard Verse Translation
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