In all the debris there are literally no vestiges of an identifiable poet to be found.”Īs for how translators deal with this puzzle-with-missing-pieces, Schmidt is particularly sharp. And as for who “wrote” it, Schmidt says “ Gilgamesh is made by a river, by fire, by generations of scribes, by shepherds, ruin-robbers, archaeologists and scholars.
So the shattered tablets of this old poem are still in flux. Even today, some ISIS looter could conceivably be selling on the black market a key bit of clay that might suddenly clarify an episode or a line. The shards of the poem were first discovered in 1853, and since then scholars have been working to fit the fragments together into a meaningful whole, like trying to fit together the pieces of a puzzle after a hurricane. And the fragments were scattered in a wide swath from Turkey to Iran. We almost lost Beowulf, which exists in a single manuscript copy that barely escaped a 1731 fire in London, and even that copy is damaged.īut at least we have Gilgamesh, that old story of the eponymous hero and his intense friendship with his doomed buddy, Enkidu - what Michael Schmidt calls “the oldest long poem in the world,” that was ancient even in 5th-century BCE Athensīut in what sense do we “have” Gilgamesh? Not only was the story composed (and recomposed, and altered) over a period of more than a thousand years after being begun maybe four thousand years ago, but it wasn’t written on paper (or papyrus) - it was stamped in cuneiform (those wedge-shaped marks that look like golf tees) on tablets of clay, which certainly kept it safe from tearing or burning. Unknown plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and even playwrights whose names we don’t know? Better, longer versions of the Homeric poems? We don’t know. Unless we are trained Scholars of the Book, we may take our books for granted: they were written, revised, published, and now they sit on our shelves.īut how much is missing? So many tens of thousands of ancient texts were destroyed by the fire (and neglect) at the Library of Alexandria, that we have no idea of how much was lost. Princeton University Press, 144 pages, $24.95. Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem by Michael Schmidt.
This is a wonderfully readable book, sure-footed in its scholarship but hip and occasionally hilarious in its tone.
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