2420: The Floating Opera by John Barth.

John Barth (1930- ), The Floating Opera, written 1955, published with the ending changed at the publisher’s request in 1956. Revised edition with the original ending restored published in 1967.

The following block of text comes to you from the past:

I’ve had the good sense, in this case, to write my thoughts as I’m having them rather than some months after forgetting them.

This book reminds me of my writing, not in the usual sense that it reminds me of my aspirations or thought processes, but that it reads like the actual things I write, or at least like the things I was trying to write when I was twenty-four, which is how old John Barth was when he wrote this. That is, more than a little annoying. My own attempts at fiction, as of a few years ago, usually disappointed me – they would spool out in a stream of clever improvisation, and then upon being read would reveal themselves as irritating and limp. Far more busy than they were purposeful. I guess that’s no surprise since I usually had no purpose in mind.

The Floating Opera began by inspiring not just a “yeah, I could write this,” but an “oh, man, this is exactly the sort of annoying thing I might write.” But then after a few chapters it had developed to “I could definitely see slightly-younger-me writing any given annoying piece of this, and even coming up with the plan for the whole, but if I had actually managed to write the whole, which is seeming to me slightly but significantly greater than the parts, I’d be pretty impressed with myself.” It’s an interesting experience; usually in matching wits with a writer as I read, I am either eventually left shamefully far behind (“Once again, I have absolutely no idea what should come next on any level, and thank god I don’t have to write it”) or I win by a landslide (“Gimme a break!”). This time I find myself keeping pace but finding the sensation of distance unfamiliar. You mean if he just keeps up this college-kid gimmicky crap all the way to the end, he’s going to end up in the Western Canon? Really?

So on the one hand, hooray, maybe I could write this, but on the other hand, boo, I don’t think it’s very good. It’s better than what it threatens at first to be, which is a charmless and nerdified imitation of the Tristram Shandy meta-narrative gimmicks, which depend exclusively upon charm to succeed. But it is that, despite what else it manages to be, and the choice to give a wide berth to cute disorder is the hallmark of the young, unpracticed jerk. Someone was complaining about this in Slate, I think, recently, in re: Advanced Topics In Calamity Physics* but also applicable to the whole post-McSweeney’s phenomenon of the “wildly ambitious” “post-modern” potpourri novel with self-referential footnotes and one page that you need to read in the mirror, by some young, unpracticed jerk. I think it’s particularly damning of Jonathan Safran Foer et ilk (and of those reviewers who have gone coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs) that The Floating Opera was written in 1955 and already plays the same game of willful novelty loosely stitched into sentimental shapes. In the 50s it feels slightly ahead of its time; by 1973 when Kurt Vonnegut was writing Breakfast of Champions he had to go overboard to get it to register because the basic gag was old news. Why then are we still so charmed out of our pants by the present day that we think that it, not to mention Dave Eggers or whoever, deserves credit for confronting modern society and coming up with this stuff?

Okay, I probably didn’t deserve “coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs,” but right now I’m trying to train myself to leave in the color rather than assess it out of existence.

If there’s anything we can learn from watching old TV clips on Youtube, it’s that by the end of the 70s (i.e. by the time I was born) both cynicism and post-cynicism had been well established and explored. Better would be “insincerity and post-insincerity.” I feel like post-insincerity has been getting pats on the back for several years now, but, and here’s what I’m saying, that’s the game of young unpracticed jerks, a fact which has been known for at least 50 years if not thousands.

* I tried to parody that title but it resists by pre-emptive snark, which is part of the point here.

By the end, Barth had outpaced me, so I grumblingly credited his book for being better than just a bunch of college-kid stuff. But now, in deeper retrospect, I see it as a bunch of college-kid stuff after all. It just covers its tracks as it goes with more skill than the start leads you to expect. The book manages to tuck in its chin as it dives, making it seem like all the clumsiness at the beginning was just a piece in a well-oiled puzzle. But that itself is just another sort of gimmick.

The book was more or less on the topic of “to be or not to be?” and more generally, “what’s it all about?” That might be “deep” but it doesn’t take much to get there; and, also, anything at all can potentially relate to that topic. It doesn’t really excuse sloppiness for it later to be revealed as part of a well-oiled tapestry of sloppiness, which is meant to evoke that oiliest tapestry of all, life. You can throw anything against that wall and it’ll stick.

But there is talent and ambition here beyond just showing off. The higher aspirations, when they rise to the surface, are similar (in my mind) to what Camus was doing in The Stranger, which I read last year. Barth wants us to notice how things are not in themselves inherently meaningful; that if we do not have a moral relationship to things, their natural state is to have no meaning, no moral value in themselves, and that life itself is potentially just as meaningless. Stated like that it’s old hat. Camus makes the idea haunting through his art; Barth’s art, by contrast, wanders around sniffing at stuff and then, in the end, reaches out and pushes the idea directly on the nose. Honks it, in fact.

The ending that his original publisher made him change – uh, spoiler alert, as they say – is that the protagonist attempts to kill himself and a lot of other people because there’s no reason to go on living, and it doesn’t work, and that doesn’t bother him because there’s no reason not to go on living. Apparently in the version that Barth changed to finally get the thing published, the guy actively decides not to kill everyone, because he sees his baby daughter and realizes that he loves her, or something similar. Hard to find a copy of that version these days.

It was hard to find this one too. I could have bought a new paperback copy but I had a feeling I wouldn’t want to keep this one – unless it was aesthetically satisfying to own. And the current paperback edition isn’t. It isn’t cheap, either. The copy I read as pictured here – first edition of the revised version – was brought out to me from the closed stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library. To which it has since returned.

We could sit here and speculate about why this was on Harold Bloom’s list, but I’ve got better things to do. I didn’t mind reading it; I just don’t recommend it. When the time comes I’ll be perfectly glad to read Giles Goat-Boy or whatever the next Barth on the list is. Interested even. I’ll bet he got better.

by Sean O’Casey (1880-1964)

Roll 4: 1418. That’s The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey, but of course I’ve never read anything by Sean O’Casey so I have to go back to the first work under his name: Juno and the Paycock.

Went to the local used bookstore and had several options; I went for a quaintly dirty pocket edition with a weirdly endearing picture of O’Casey on the cover.

When I’m looking for a play, it seems always to be readily available at the first bookstore I try – and this feels reasonable, because: who ever buys plays? Nobody. So of course they’re all still there for me. The same is not true of poetry, however, despite its no doubt being an even slower seller than drama. In that case the problem is, I assume, that bookstores must buy their poetry stock more or less at random. You’re gonna tell me there’s a poetry buff on staff in every bookstore in the country? Not possible.

Am I joking? I think I’m joking.

Anyway, Irish playwright, Dublin tenement, tragicomedy. I’ve been reluctant to write about this play because it went about that fast, and it was months ago. I read it at just under the speed of performance, which is very very fast by reading standards, despite being essentially the “intended” speed of the work. Intended or not, it didn’t make a strong impression. This is a problem with plays, which weigh so much less than novels, and I’m not sure what the solution is for a reader. Seeing the play, obviously, would be better than reading it – though again there are problems with that as well; usually even when I see a play, I still feel underexposed. After the performance I generally wish I could go back and run over certain scenes again (or, if I wasn’t impressed, am happy to let loose a memory hell-bent on fading).

I get that a poem of 8 lines can be “as good” as a novel of 500 pages because of the apples and the oranges, but somehow with plays, the fruit-rating metaphor doesn’t satisfy me. With a play, something about artistic scale always seems actually to be out of whack. How can a play be as serious as a book? A movie, which lasts about as long as a play and is at least superficially similar in presentation, is not a problem for me; I see what movies have that let them “rate” as artistic objects of worth. Why do plays still feel thin?

In a recent conversation it was put to me that plays do not have the same peculiar power to engage that movies have because in a play the people are small and manifestly far away, whereas in a movie, the people occupy enough of our field of vision to call on our social instincts. Faces in a movie appear in our brains more or less at the scale of people who are only a few feet away, and whose actions therefore require not just comprehension but actual emotional response. Speculative though it may be, I find this quasi-biological explanation extremely convincing.

But there’s another reason that plays seem thin, I think, which is that plays are, compared to movies, thin. On content. A movie screenplay might only be as long as a stage script, but the movie itself is enriched ten thousand times over by that other pictureworth of words in every frame. A play is not made of pictures; it’s made of people, clothes, curtains, and stuff, and nobody ever said people, clothes, curtains, and stuff are worth ten thousand words. Understandably. A photograph of a play in some ways offers me more room for the imagination than the play itself; in the moment that the event actually happens, if I’m there, I am unavoidably aware of the actuality of people on a stage, which actually leaves less of my consciousness free for entering into the created world. The live presence of live people is supposed to be the essence of the magic of theater, but if the magic involves a world other than the theater in which those people exist with you, can’t their presence actually dampen the magic?

Theater, unlike film and literature, is openly false. The falseness can be put in the service of “truth,” but the falseness is essential. Yes, I know, fiction is lies, and film is essentially illusion, but lies and illusion are different from falseness. Lies and illusion can be taken for the truth. For the most part theater embraces this falseness, and why not? It’s a pretty steep uphill battle to convince anyone that a stage is anything other than a stage. Better just to offer the audience that it “represents” something else, in the realm of the imagination.

Plays, despite being presented to our faces, take place in the imagination. Movies do not. Books do, but, a-ha my point, books are much longer.

A play bears the same relationship to its script that a musical performance does to its score; a movie, by contrast, is the fungal organic mess that grows all over the rigid planter of the screenplay. Id est, much more complex. The additional complexity in a play is supposed to be in the performances, and in some spark of danger that comes from the live phenomenon – and maybe, like I said that time, in the weird communal temple of doom aspect. To me, though, these things generally don’t balance out the tens of thousands of other words that I might have gotten from pictures, or from a book that includes, literally, tens of thousands of other words.

Which is to say that this play didn’t make a serious impression… and that I’m not sure how to make the next play I read make a serious impression, either.

Some comments about the play itself, to prove that I read it: the tragic and comic elements alternate and mingle and jostle for attention in an interesting way. There’s something potent about having outright vaudeville routines thrown at you in a very grim context, particularly because in this case the intention of the playwright was not obvious. He wasn’t up to any normal showmanly thing: trying to shock or draw a contrast or to offer relief or anything like that. I’m not even sure he intended the juxtaposition to be unusual. I think he was both aiming higher than all of that, and also thinking less about it. The comedy face/tragedy face thing seems like it’s been part of the Irish self-image since well before Sean O’Casey. Melodrama alternating with slapstick was the bread and butter of the popular theater for years and years, too, so in that sense the material was just of its time. But the play also had “realist” aspirations – what with all the social ills! – and that put a weird spin on the broader stuff. In part I think he was doing it intentionally; in part I think it’s just aged a little funny.

If you didn’t notice from its title: this play is one of those “dialect texts” where the author has taken pains to capture the couple of local peculiarities of speech that strike him as significant, every time they occur. Exempli gratia: “I wasn’t in ayther wan snug or dh’other.” This makes for rough reading, though I guess it would also make for rough listening. Anyway, dialect transcription like this can be a sign of either earnest realism or broad comedy. In this case it was both. As with Huckleberry Finn.

I think that the aesthetic impact of these tensions in the material could probably be increased to the point of being very satisfying by a good performance. All in all, this is a performer’s play. Lots of opportunities to make business and life out of it. Like reading a promising sitcom script – I’m not laughing at these words, but someone might use them to make me laugh. Someone might use this play to make me feel something. Then again they might fail to.

In telling someone about my reading scheme, I mentioned that I had read this play, and she said she’d actually seen the play performed. I, curious about what kind of life it might take on in the flesh, asked how it was. She said, “amazing.” That was that.

There’s a whole essay to be written about my problem with people saying that things are “amazing,” but since I don’t plan to write it, I’ll tell you what the problem is right here. It’s this: When I was young, old fogies would sometimes complain that the words “fantastic” and “unbelievable” were being widely abused by airheads, but at that time, at least, you could still take these to be exaggerated versions of “good!” Nowadays, these words, and especially “amazing,” no longer necessarily mean even “good.” “Amazing” frequently means nothing, because people seem to use it when called upon to voice opinions about things they have no clear opinions about. When someone, especially someone I don’t know very well (as was the case in this example) tells me that something is “amazing,” I usually get the impression only that the person wants to align him/herself with other proponents of that thing, not that the person himself has any positive assessment of the thing itself.

On the other hand, I know quite a few people who say “amazing” when they have any strong genuine reaction to a thing. In one sense they are saying that they are amazed that anything in this vale of ennui has the capacity to actually impress. Beth has pointed out with amusement how these people I know – actors, they are – seem to say “it’s kind of amazing” several times per conversation. I’ll admit that in the heat of it all I sometimes fail to notice things like this.

Back to Juno (and the paycock):

Is there a faithful Hitchcock film of this play featuring several of the original cast members? Yes, there is. Why haven’t I watched that yet? I don’t know.

Is there a failed Marc Blitzstein musical called Juno based on this play? Yes, there is. Why haven’t I watched that? You can’t. Not even at the New York Public Library. All right, actually, they have video of this revival but I don’t really want to make an appointment just to watch THAT. Well, okay, maybe I will sometime. Eh.

Juno and the Peacock, by the way, is a tale from Aesop. I didn’t know this previously.

I want to note that this, my fifth Western Canon selection, was the first that I didn’t have to read in translation. It was actually written in English, for a change. Well, sort of English.

by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)

translation of Kazaki into English by Peter Constantine (Modern Library, 2006)

Third roll: 989 – lands me on “Tolstoy: Short Novels,” from whence I bounce back to the first unread Tolstoy on the list, which turns out to be the first Tolstoy on the list, I not having read anything by Tolstoy other than, I think, a short story or two long ago. The first Tolstoy on the list is The Cossacks. A new translation had just come out last year so I was immediately able to pick up a copy of it, again at the Strand Annex, for $6 or something like that. See above for visual aid.

This Modern Library edition dates it to 1862 but the internet consensus seems to be 1863. In any case it was in the works for 10 years or so, presumably started around the time in Tolstoy’s life that it surely represents. It’s a young man’s work about being a young man. A certain type of young man’s work about being a certain type of young man, in fact. To jump directly to my opinion: the book is clearly an effort to have a broader perspective on the foibles of this certain type of young man – the author wants to write as though he is able to look in from the outside and observe truths that just happen to be about who he is, or was. But I don’t think the author was as much more mature than his past-self protagonist as he must have thought. The perspective is lacking.

The book started with a brisk portrait of this kid, Olenin – philosophically curious and reasonably self-aware about how privileged and pampered his life is, but all the same, blindingly self-centered – and I was immediately excited at the prospect that it would have something to say to my generation. Possibly something chastening. Presumably something sturdier than whatever Indecision was saying (with its mouth full). But in the end – skipping to the end – it’s not clear that it was saying anything much. It’s not clear to me what Olenin should have or could have learned. It definitely comes across that Tolstoy, in living among the Cossacks as described in the book, felt that their spiritually and psychologically uncomplicated existences were a humiliating counter-example to his own personality, and that that felt like a significant life experience to him. But isn’t that itself a pretty self-centered way of seeing the world? Yes, and Tolstoy tries to acknowledge that by making the romantic significance that Olenin imparts to the Cossacks seem slightly ridiculous. Yet the book itself clearly believes that their straightforward rurality is indeed a thing of great and significant beauty – he saves his most attentive writing for descriptions of the dirt and the cows and the smells and sounds. In any case, making Olenin’s various philosophical passions out to be “naive” seemed to be the full extent of the higher authorial wisdom. The real intention here was, I believe, to record a setting and a frame of mind that were memorable and intense in the living. It was all right as a fictionalized memoir, limited but still interesting as a character study (and a cultural study), and frustrating as a novel (or novella, really – it’s quite short).

It could be argued that this is a book about a life-changing experience that intentionally leaves the life-changing for after the curtain has fallen. That wouldn’t be a bad idea for a book, and I could be convinced that this was that book. Whatever the intention, though, it doesn’t change the fact that I finished it feeling that it hadn’t given me enough thoughts to chew on about the action. Olenin’s plentiful thoughts don’t count – they are the action. And don’t try telling me that the book was an impartial rendering of events, offered up to us to interpret or not as we like. Please. If it was that, it was only that by default.

Despite its being, as stated, quite short, it still took me a long time to get through this because I was reading it aloud, which always slows things down drastically. We ended up doing this a chapter at a time, and it’s made up of many short little chapters. Peter Constantine did a perfectly fine job making the English readable, but I wouldn’t recommend giving this one that kind of slow and careful attention – the form is something less than taut and it would probably best be read quickly in one or two long gulps. The old Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, which I think was the only English version available prior to last year, seems, on skimming, perfectly acceptable. Yes, it’s a little 19th-century-cated, but so is Tolstoy.

I did come away with a more specific interest than previously in reading Tolstoy’s more mature, more famous works. There were a few ambitious scenes of philosophical revelation in The Cossacks that were intriguing and admirable when taken in isolation, and I got excited about the prospect of seeing the same sort of thing done with greater control. Next Tolstoy will be War and Peace. Whenever that comes up.

Oops, finished, but then I thought of this to say – one section of the book portrays Olenin going, nervously, in the throes of a wicked crush, to a party with a bunch of giggling girls, and then, after the evening plays out, returning home to muse on the fantastic, near-universal significance of everything that has happened. This scene, and others, I thought, were very successful at evoking high school. My dismay, then, was that nowhere in the book did we get to hear from the Daniel Stern voice, so to speak. Without that guy putting it in perspective, high school is just a big mess; we need that guide to help us differentiate our attitude toward high school gossip from the attitude of high school kids. If we don’t think Olenin’s love is as real as Olenin does, what do we think? It depends what happens to him when he grows up. I guess he grows up to be Tolstoy. That would have been an interesting book.

That is, in fact, what all of Proust’s big-ass book is – high school nonsense dissected endlessly from stratospherically high above it all. I loved that. This, by contrast, either had nothing to say yet or didn’t want to let us in on it, and what fun is that?

by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681)
translation of La vida es sueño into English by Roy Campbell (~1957)

Life is a Dream, and other Spanish Classics, edited by Eric Bentley (Applause, 1985)

My second spin gave the number 253, which landed me on The Doctor of His Own Honor by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. However, this being the fourth listed of four works by Calderón, I read the first instead: Life is a Dream. “Translated by Roy Campbell,” says Bloom. To my surprise, I found that very edition on my first bookstore attempt, at the Strand Annex, for I think $4. Not bad.

It’s one thing to chat out my thoughts about stuff as I’m reading it, but now, months after the fact, I have to either dig deep to fake some thoughts about something I’ve stopped thinking about, or be reduced to just “reviewing” it, which is a pretty dull business, for me. But better that I should try to catch up then be constantly owing this site thoughts that I no longer have; here then is a very brief review.

Ed. note after finishing: No it’s not! I should never announce things before I write them.

This was a very pleasant read and would probably make for a satisfying time at the theater, provided a suitably period-receptive attitude. I don’t have any particularly nuanced understanding of 17th century literature or drama, so naturally this reminds me of Shakespeare. It reminds me of Shakespeare not just in manner but also in theme and treatment and rhetorical style and wit and a lot of other things, such that despite my lack of knowledge I’m tempted to believe that the comparison isn’t a complete “well duh,” but I could be wrong. In doing some searching on Calderón, I see that it is common practice to say that Calderón’s greatest works are on par with Shakespeare and have comparable depth, but not exactly to say that they had similar techniques. Seemed to me that they did but what do I know. Life is a Dream moved a little faster than the mature Shakespeare works we all know, had a little more silly plot business and a few more sudden shifts of emphasis, but we all know that Shakespeare wasn’t above silly plot nonsense.

Hard to say what’s the style of an era and what’s the style of an individual, especially when the individual is seen as both the representative example and the exceptional example of that era. This is what Charles Rosen says at the beginning of The Classical Style.

The plot is – well, you can read it on Wikipedia or you can take it from me – that when the prince is born, there’s a prophesy that he will bring some kind of disaster to the country, so the king, attempting to beat the prophesy, has his son imprisoned in a cell off in the mountains and tells everyone he died. That’s the premise. During the action of the play, the king decides to test his grown captive son, just to see whether he’s really bad news or not. The prince has been raised by a jailer without knowing who he is or why he’s there, and because of his circumstances has grown up to be an amoral violent wildman. The king decides to test him by having him drugged and reawakened in the castle and told who is. If he behaves badly, they’ll drug him again and return him to his cell, where he’ll be told that it was all a dream. And that’s what happens: he behaves very badly and is returned to his former life and convinced he dreamed it all. In the final act, he ends up being freed again, but now, having mused on this experience, he learns his lesson: since everything could turn out to be merely a dream, he’d be better off behaving humbly and morally.

There’s a lot more plot to it. Though I wouldn’t exactly call it elegant, the additional plotting is well-crafted in that nearly all of it is informed by the themes of will vs. fate and dreams vs. reality.

It struck me then and it strikes me now, though, that the lesson the prince learns is exactly backward. If everything turns out to be a dream, then it doesn’t matter how one behaves oneself. In a dream, why not kill and rape? It’s in reality that one’s actions have consequences for other humans (and, presumably, have consequences in the eyes of God). The prince does not kill out of a lack of humility; he kills because he has finally been unshackled and that’s what his base instincts urge him to do. It seems to me that what he needs to learn is that life is not just a dream; that he is not morally alone in his own mind but is participating in a real world with other humans and with God.

So in practical reality the moral doesn’t work, for me. The only way I can make any sense of the play’s moral logic is to translate the message of “life is dream” into “you can’t take it with you” – when you awake, in this case. As the prince tells himself in Act III,

… Do not thus
Be puffed to pride by these uncertain plaudits
Which, when I wake, will turn to bitterness
In that I won them only to be lost.
The less I value them, the less I’ll miss them.

Which is a fair bit different from the overall message, the paradoxical “be on good behavior because it might not be real.”

The various elements of the play fit together to create a bit of a moral mindbender – the prince is only bad because his father abused him in attempt to avoid his becoming bad; he is only able to actually do evil in the world because his father feels remorse and gives him a chance at freedom; he then learns his lesson which is to be more humble and not feel entitled to freedom; he eventually achieves freedom thanks to rebels who oppose his father’s actions; in the end he wisely places himself at his father’s mercy rather than get revenge (as was the rebels’ plan). Certainly plenty of interesting stuff to think about in there, and much of it expressed in attractive, intelligent poetry. But all the same, kind of confused. This sort of thing always happens when you put prophesies in your plots, I think. Though there was something intriguing about reading these heady Shakespearean (Calderónian) monologues wherein philosophy has taken a turn into the surreal. If you give up on trying to learn anything in particular from it, there’s no question that the piece had a lot of dramatic life to it. The basic hook here – putting someone in a to-them-miraculous situation and then telling them it was all a dream – is very rich.

In this case, Bloom’s recommended translation was superb. I think I came away even more impressed with Roy Campbell than with Calderón. Everything falls very comfortably and fluidly into iambic pentameter, nothing is awkward or unclear, and all the color and imagery feels alive and unforced. The vocabulary was extremely well-chosen: there was no mannered attempt to place the English into the 17th century, but it never felt jarringly as though it belonged to any other time in particular. Both humor and pathos came through intact. I was truly impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever read a verse translation before that accomplished quite as much as this did. Maybe that’s not saying much.

There’s a public domain translation by Edward Fitzgerald but it actually seems to be a complete reworking, with almost no direct relationship to the original Spanish that I can see. So I don’t recommend that. Really, I can’t imagine there being a better version of this play than the one I read. The New York Times seems to agree – here they approve of the Campbell version, whereas this doesn’t sound any good. This sounds like it didn’t quite work, sorry Irene. On the other hand, what does the New York Times know?

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970)

Giuseppe Ungaretti: Selected Poems, translated by Patrick Creagh (Penguin, 1971)
Selected Poems, translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Andrew Frisardi (FSG, 2002)
Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated and edited by Allen Mandelbaum (Cornell, 1975)

After lingering a while with the various copies of Gilgamesh, I declared it done and proceeded as per the plan. A random integer between 1 and 2535 was generated: 1128. 1128 is the line on my master list that says “Giuseppe Ungaretti.” This means I read the first work listed under his name. There are two work entries for Ungaretti: the first is Selected Poems (Bloom specifies that he means the collection translated by Allen Mandelbaum), and the second is The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems (a collection translated by Kevin Hart). This is an odd redundancy for Bloom, who usually likes to be sweeping and efficient and just drop something like “Collected Works” under an author’s name and be done with it. For William Shakespeare the only entries are “Plays” and “Poems.” And yet for the somewhat lesser figure of Giuseppe Ungaretti he’s taking the time to name two different translations of what must be substantially the same selections. The Mandelbaum seems to have long been the only major collection of Ungaretti in English, as well as the one with the finest pedigree, since Mandelbaum knew Ungaretti personally. The Hart collection, by contrast, was printed by a small Canberra publisher (!) in 1990 and is extremely rare in the US even among university collections. Why then would Bloom have put this redundant oddity on his list? All my hypotheses are fairly cynical. Anyway, if I ever roll a 1130 I’m going to have a hard time a) finding that edition and b) feeling like I haven’t already read it.

I went to the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library and got out what they had – no copies of the Mandelbaum were checked in and/or un-lost, but two other collections – one a little Perm-a-bound paperback from the early 70s “Penguin Modern European Poets” series, translated by Patrick Creagh (first image above); the other a recent, still-in-print collection translated by Andrew Frisardi (second image above). Later I found the Mandelbaum collection at the Brooklyn Public Library. Third image. Above.

So, you might ask, who the hell is Giuseppe Ungaretti? I certainly didn’t know. Exactly the kind of surprise I hoped this project would generate! I’m serious. A quick Wikipedia or something like it gave me the basics: one of the most prominent 20th century Italian poets. Founder of “hermetic” school of poetry. Born in Egypt, famous for World War I poems.

The “hermetic” thing, though good for encyclopedia entries, was played down by all three editor-translators in their various introductions. The word “hermetic” suggests a way of reading the style – I tried to let it guide me somewhat in determining what I should consider peculiar to Ungaretti and his particular moment – but none of the commentators endorsed this idea that this was a school and that Ungaretti was the founder. So I pretty much disregarded that. They did all try to place Ungaretti in the context of the history of Italian poetry. But when one isn’t familiar with a history, placing something within it tends only to diminish rather than illuminate: it seems as though the curator/editor is acknowledging that the thing in itself is not necessarily interesting and is best served by being seen as a mere component of a larger pageant. I know that’s not the intention, but that’s the effect on the ignorant, i.e. me. So I mostly disregarded that, too.

For most of my life, my reading comprehension has been characterized to some degree by compromise, approximation, and sour grapes. Part of the impetus behind this random-reading scheme was the feeling that I’d finally reached a point in life where I could read and actually get most anything. Well, the first arrow fired went straight through a gaping hole in my armor. “Oh right, poetry.”

I don’t understand poetry primarily in that I have not read enough of it. That’s fine, of course, but what it means is that if you (or I) sit me down with a book of poetry and tell me to read and understand it… no matter how slowly and thoughtfully I go, I can’t necessarily do that. First I’m going to have to go through a process of acclimation to poetry as a whole, and try though I might to be smart, there’s no shortcut to the head of that class. I’m not embarrassed by that but I am disappointed. It’s just going to take a lot of poetry for me to build up a fluid, mature sense of what this stuff is. The selected poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti can be one step on that road. I don’t imagine it’s the step that anyone would have chosen to assign me at this stage in my alienation from poesy, but as with learning a language, just jumping into the deep end (or perhaps, in this case, diving hard into the shallow end) also has its benefits.

Another problem with this selection, though, was that it’s poetry in translation. Translating modern poetry is a losing game. All translation is a loss of resolution, and Ungaretti’s little sketches would seem to be all about fine resolution. Translating a poem is like making an engraving of a painting, like they used to do to make images reproducible. It’s a lossy process but the sacrifice is worthwhile for those who won’t be able to see the image any other way. But translating poems that are all about the resonating implications of particular words and sounds, turning them into other words and other sounds, is like making an engraving of a Jackson Pollock. The painting is all about paint, so what are we to make of this line drawing of it? It refers to it but it doesn’t stand in for it.

Better metaphor here would be a blocky scan of a delicate line drawing.

Frisardi and Mandelbaum, understanding what they’re up against, opt for bilingual editions with the original Italian facing the translation. One attempts to read the original by means of the translation, which serves as a one-to-one phrasebook and tour guide. This I can get behind, but it’s hard work. I had the benefit of having several translations (quite a few of the poems were in all three collections) from which to triangulate a meaning. Plus, luckily, though Italian might be hard to learn for real, it’s fairly easy to fake-understand when you’re being told what it means. So I managed.

Then there’s the hard work of poetry itself. On which issue: here follow some things I wrote down while I was in the process of reading. Particular reference is being made to the World War I poetry, which begins all three collections.

War poetry is very different for writer and reader. In the midst of an overwhelming horror, four choice lines may be a distillation but they are also a contrast. What is most poignant and intense is that poetry is actually quite unlike war. It’s something different to read four choice lines while sitting on the couch. The imagination is responsible not only for everything the poem is meant to evoke, but also for everything that it chooses not to evoke but which to the poet was immediate.

This is my difficulty with poetry. It is an art based in empathy, the delivery of interior sensations and impressions, and yet the interior context in which these sensations find their meaning is not itself delivered. How could it be? A metaphor that often presents itself in my mind presents itself here – the fact that the human DNA sequence has been mapped would seem to be all we need to know everything about how the body does everything, but it isn’t, because protein folding – the conversion of the linear chain of chemicals into a functional lump – is an opaque process, dependent on many tiny details of context. That the poet thought these four lines were choice is certainly information, but the internal world in which he thought so is ours to recover/invent.

Ungaretti begins a poem:

The face
of this night
is dry
like a
parchment

That’s Mandelbaum; Creagh has

Tonight’s
face
is dry
as a piece of
parchment

and Frisardi doesn’t include it. Anyway. What kind of night has a face that’s dry like a parchment? I can easily imagine that such a night – such a kind of night – exists, and that Ungaretti was there, and sensed it, and got it down beautifully. But he was living it when he wrote these words, and as I am reading them, I am not. To find this night, I cannot follow the parchment face backward – it leads nowhere, or only to some misty poetry limbo that does not satisfy me. I have to imagine different kinds of nights and test them – would this sort of (imagined) night inspire me to say that it had a face as dry as a piece of parchment? I am the active agent, investigating this inert unhelpful artifact, this poem. This is not communication. Poetry, or at least this sort of poetry, does not communicate, it only records and arranges. If I do not already possess the poet’s experiences, I cannot find them here. Only my imagination can provide them.

It is one thing to experience a night and recognize that its salient feature is that its face is dry like parchment. It’s another to extrapolate a night, knowing only that its salient feature is that its face is dry like parchment.

Perhaps this is the skill that poetry requires, but if so, mine is very weak. Or at least I don’t trust that what I find, when I let my mind create following scant poetic indications, has any more to do with the poet than it does with me.

And it should. All art should. I have enough thoughts and enough things to think about that I don’t need art as an ice-breaker with no other agenda.

As with the crossword puzzle, what to the conossieur might feel like pure deduction is actually enculturation. The seasoned solver may believe that he is fundamentally sharper than the rookie when in fact he has reprogrammed his own intuition over a long process of trial and error. A seasoned reader (or writer) might feel that the indications are full and sufficient, when in fact they are only sufficient when taken in combination with a silent complex of assumptions and expectations that cannot be simulated by any conscious thought process but must simply be amassed over the course of years.

I’ve developed intricate enough associative webs for dealing with a variety of cultural products. But not poetry. Not yet.

So anyway, accepting that I wasn’t quite up to the task, what was the poetry like? It was a mixed bag. The voice of the poems, throughout Ungaretti’s career, always has a certain innocent-in-the-face-of-the-infinite awe. I would call his outlook “naive,” except that it gets worked and reworked in such a wide variety of intellectual configurations that the word “naive” seems misleading. The introductions all praise the absence of bitterness in his poems, his openness to life’s mystery even in the face of war or tragic personal loss. I can see it that way. Certainly in the collection he wrote after the death of his young son, there’s something quite affecting in his combination of heartfelt anguish with mystery-of-nature imagery. But much of the time, the air of awed humility, or even the pose of wise detachment, rang a little false for me. Something about his interest, which many poets seem to share, in the figure of the poet – or sometimes quite blatantly in the figure of himself – felt indulgent rather than open. In general I had the unhappy suspicion that his poetic expression was vague, mystical and self-involved because he was vague, mystical and self-involved, and that the rather tedious classicizing his poetry underwent later in his career was just a mask for said vagueness.

That’s the negative, but there was much here that I enjoyed – poetry, no less! – which for me is saying something. His imagery is distinctive, somehow both plain and mysterious, and I frequently admired phrases and images, even when I was skeptical of the poems they formed. At his best, his poems create a quiet sense of beauty and human emotion dwarfed by, yet suspended poignantly within, the sobering reality of the infinite. That’s quite a sentence; something like that, though. There is that suggestion, as with haiku, that the delicacy and obliqueness of the poetry is the only possible response to the profound actuality of time, death, the world. When it worked, it was lovely. But most of the time, either it was too difficult for me or it was more manner than thought. I assume it was the former. In asking “why this here and not another” about any given phrase or image, I had no clear answer and wasn’t convinced he did either, even though the commentators told me to admire his incredibly careful craftsmanship. But, for the last time: I’m not good at this yet.

Here’s one of the better of the early, readily-understood war poems. I figure you deserve a poem after reading all that. Plus you get to see what I was dealing with in terms of parallel translations. Also, I imagine this is the poem that Frisardi collection’s cover designer had in mind.

Creagh:

Futility
Vallone, 19 August 1917

Suddenly
high
above the rubble
spreads the crystal
wonder
of boundless space

And the man
bent
over the water
startled
by the sun
comes back to his senses
as a shadow

Cradled and
gradually
crushed

Mandelbaum:

Vanity
Vallone, August 19, 1917

Suddenly
steep
above the rubble heaps
the limpid
wonder
of immensity

And the man
bent
over the water
startled
by the sun
awakes
as a shadow

Cradled and
slowly
shattered

Frisardi:

Vanity
Vallone, August 19, 1917

Suddenly
the lucid
awesome
vastness
is high
above the rubble

And the man
bent
over the sun-
shocked
water
finds
he’s a shadow

Rocked and
gently
broken

In this particular case, Frisardi has gone the route of literal sense whereas Creagh goes in the other direction. Mandelbaum tries for a middle ground. I’m all for literal sense. In fact this is one of those cases where I’m not sure Creagh fully understood. None of these guys tried at all for the rhythmic effect that seems crucial to the original. Judge for yourself:

Vanità
Vallone il 19 agosto 1917

D’improvviso
è alto
sulle macerie
il limpido
stupore
dell’immensità

E l’uomo
curvato
sull’acqua
sorpresa
dal sole
si rinviene
un’ombra

Cullata e
piano
franta

So: I think the Frisardi translations are generally the most helpful to the reader and his collection is the largest, whereas Mandelbaum’s selections, though a tad more stiffly translated, were more in accord with my personal taste regarding which poems deserved inclusion. Creagh, on the other hand, strays very slightly further from the text and comes the closest to writing attractive poetry in English. Unfortunately, there are too many places where he lets the meaning become even more obscure than it would seem to be in Italian.

For comparison, here are, from every English version I could find, the opening lines of Tablet V. After a long journey, Gilgamesh and Enkidu arrive at the cedar forest. They are on a quest to kill its guardian, the monster Humbaba (Huwawa).

I’ve divided these into four categories based on the translator’s apparent intent, and ordered them by date within each category. Let me know if you are aware of versions that I’m missing. The dates are of the first editions, though the texts are not necessarily.

A. Line for line translations.

Alexander Heidel (1946, Chicago)

1. They stood still and looked(?) at the forest.
2. They beheld the height of the cedar.
3. They beheld the entrance to the forest.
4. Where Humbaba was wont to walk there was a path;
5. Straight were the tracks and good was the passage.
6. They beheld the mountain of the cedar, the dwelling-place of the gods, the throne-dais of Irnini.
7. The cedar uplifted its fulness before the mountain;
8. Fair was its shade (and) full of delight;
9. [Cov]ered was the brushwood (and) covered the […].

John Gardner and John Maier (1984, Knopf/Vintage)

They stood looking at the forest.
They saw the cedars’ height;
they saw the forest gate.
Where Humbaba walked, a path was made.
The alleys were straight, the road good.
They saw the cedar mountain, home of the gods, throne-base of Irnini.
On the face of the mountain, the cedar lifts its seed.
Its shade is good, full of comfort.
The thorn is covered and hidden …
… the incense of the tree …
… one double-hour …
… again for two-thirds …
…

Maureen Gallery Kovacs (1989, Stanford) [online]

They stood at the forest’s edge,
gazing at the top of the Cedar Tree,
gazing at the entrance fo the forest.
Where Humbaba would walk there was a trail,
the roads led straight on, the path was excellent.
Then they saw the Cedar Mountain, the Dwelling of the Gods, the throne dais of Irnini.
Across the face of the mountain the Cedar brought forth luxurious foliage,
its shade was good, extremely pleasant.
The thornbushes were matted together, the woods(?) were a thicket
…among the Cedars, …the boxwood,
the Forest was surrounded by a ravine two leagues long,
…and again for two-thirds (of that distance),

Stephanie Dalley (1989, Oxford)

They stood at the edge of the forest,
Gazed and gazed at the height of the pines,
Gazed and gazed at the entrance to the pines,
Where Humbaba made tracks as he went to and fro.
The paths were well trodden and the road was excellent.
They beheld the Pine Mountain, dwelling-place of gods, shrine of Irnini.
The pines held up their luxuriance even on the face of the mountain.
Their shade was good, filling one with happiness.
Undergrowth burgeoned, entangling the forest.

Andrew George (1999, Penguin)

They stood there marvelling at the forest,
&nbsp&nbsp gazing at the lofty cedars,
gazing at the forest’s entrance ­-
&nbsp&nbsp where Humbaba came and went there was a track.

The path was straight and the way well trodden.
&nbsp&nbsp They saw the Mountain of Cedar, seat of gods and goddesses’ throne.
[On the] face of the mountain the cedar proffered its abundance,
&nbsp&nbsp its shade was sweet and full of delight.

[Thick] tangled was the thorn, the forest a shrouding canopy,
&nbsp&nbsp …cedar, ballukku-trees……

Benjamin R. Foster (2001, Norton)

They stood at the edge of the Forest,
They gazed at the height of the cedars,
They gazed at the way into the forest.
Where Humbaba would walk, a path was made,
Straight were the ways and easy the going.
They saw the cedar mountain, dwelling of the gods, sacred to the goddess Irnina.
On the slopes of that mountain, the cedar bears its abundance,
Agreeable is its shade, full of pleasures.
The undergrowth is tangled, the [thicket] interwoven.
Near the cedar [ … ] the balsam tree

B. Conservatively re-written versions.

N.K. Sandars (1960, Penguin)

Together they went down from the gate and they came to the green mountain. There they stood still, they were struck dumb; they stood still and gazed at the forest. They saw the height of the cedar, they saw the way into the forest and the track where Humbaba was used to walk. The way was broad and the going was good. They gazed at the mountain of cedars, the dwelling-place of the gods and the throne of Ishtar. The hugeness of the cedar rose in front of the mountain, its shade was beautiful, full of comfort; mountain and glade were green with brushwood.

Robert Temple (1991, Random House) [online]

They stood quite still and looked at the forest,
Saw how high were the great cedars,
And gazed upon the entrance to the forest.
There, where Humbaba was want to tread,
Was a fine path; straight it was and easy to travel.
They saw also the Cedar Mountain, where lived the gods
And Irnini, Goddess of Love, holy Inanna had her throne seat
The cedar raised aloft its great luxuriant growth:
What cool shade, what delight!
Covering the brushwood, covering the….

Danny P. Jackson (1992, Bolchazy-Carducci) [online]

Gilgamesh and Enkidu froze and stared into the woods’
great depth and height. When they spied
Humbaba’s path, they found the opening toward
straight passage. Then they were able to find and see
the home of the gods, the paradise of Ishtar’s other self,
called Irnini-most-attractive.
All beauty true is ever there
where gods do dwell, where there is
cool shade and harmony and
sweet-odored food to match their mood.

Stephen Mitchell (2004, Simon & Schuster)

They stood at the edge of the Cedar Forest,
marveling at the great height of the trees.
They could see, before them, a well-marked trail
beaten by Humbaba as he came and went.
From far off they saw the Cedar Mountain,
sacred to Ishtar, where the gods dwell,
the slopes of it steep, and rich in cedars
with their sharp fragrance and pleasant shade.
Gripping their axes, their knives unsheathed,
they entered the Forest and made their way through
the tangle of thorn bushes underfoot.

C. Liberally re-written versions.

Herbert Mason (1970, currently Houghton Mifflin)

They stood in awe at the foot
Of the green mountain. Pleasure
Seemed to grow from fear for Gilgamesh.
As when one comes upon a path in woods
Unvisited by men, one is drawn near
The lost and undiscovered in himself;
He was revitalized by danger.
They knew it was the path Humbaba made.
Some called the forest “Hell,” and others “Paradise”;
What difference does it make? said Gilgamesh.
But night was falling quickly
And they had no time to call it names,
Except perhaps “The Dark,”
Before they found a place at the edge of the forest
To serve as shelter for their sleep.

David Ferry (1992, FSG)

They came to the Cedar Forest that grew upon
the sides of the Cedar Mountain, throne of Irnini,

forbidden dwelling place of immortal gods.
This was the place the guradian demon guarded

to frighten away the daring mortal who
would venture there. But who would venture there?

This was the place Huwawa was; Huwawa’s
breath is death. Beautiful is the Forest;

green upon green the cedars; fragrant the air
with the fragrance of cedar trees; the box that grew

along the silent walks of the guardian demon,
shadowed and still, utterly still, was fragrant.

D. High concept.

Derrek Hines (2002, Chatto and Windus/Random House)

In the valley of the Bekaa under Mt Lebanon.
Easy soldiering with the ladies willing,
their legs spread wide as a peal of bells;

plenty of grub, and the zig of split-stone fences
snaking through terraced orchards,
apple and Eve ready.
Good, rolling chariot country.

Sumerian / Assyrian traditional
standard Akkadian version attributed to Sin-leqe-unnini, probably ~1200 BC.

Myths From Mesopotamia, edited and translated with an Introduction and Notes by Stephanie Dalley, revised edition (Oxford, 2000)
Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, by David Ferry (FSG, 1992)
The Epic of Gilgamesh, an English version with an introduction by N.K. Sandars (Penguin, 1964 ed.)
Bohuslav Martinů: Gilgames [The Epic of Gilgamesh] (1954-5) (as recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra & Chorus under Jirí Belohlávek, 1995. BBC Music vol. IV no. 11, 1996)

So the first thing I did upon solidifying this plan – the inspiration happened in August but I didn’t really move on it until September – was go to Foyle’s, one of the biggest bookstores in London, which happened to be just a few blocks from where I was working at the time, and look for a copy of Gilgamesh. At the time I didn’t yet know that Harold Bloom’s list had more info on it than what can be seen here, so I figured the choice of translation was up to me. There were heaps of Oxford paperbacks on the front tables at Foyle’s – 3 for 2, as you can see above – and right there was “Myths From Mesopotamia,” featuring the Epic of Gilgamesh. I flipped through and the treatment seemed scholarly but unobtrusive. On the back it said “Revised Edition” and also “So much has been discovered in recent years both by way of new tablets and points of grammar and lexicography that these translations by Stephanie Dalley supersede all previous versions.” This edition first published in 2000. Okay, so I bought it.

The images above, by the way, link to full-size scans of the copies I read. PRETTY AWESOME.

Beth and I read Gilgamesh aloud over a couple weeks. The work in its most complete form was written on twelve tablets, and those divisions are maintained in most versions. We did a tablet at a time. Many of them feel like meaningful chapter divisions; a few don’t.

Gilgamesh – or The Epic of Gilgamesh (it’s certainly episodic but it’s not nearly as long or involved as “epic” usually implies) – or, as the ancient librarians called it, “Of him who found out all things,” which is the first line – gets press as “the oldest literary text” and then dated to “almost 5000 years ago,” which is misleading. Gilgamesh may have been a real historical figure – he’s recorded as such, anyway, elsewhere – and whoever he was, he may have lived around 2800 BC. So that’s almost 5000 years ago. But the not-very-historical-King-Arthur-ish stories about him that constitute The Epic of Gilgamesh first appear in writing around 2100 BC. That is, many centuries later. And those are just disconnected stories in Sumerian – earlier versions of a few of the episodes in the epic. Then a few hundred years later, after political shifting, they appear in a somewhat unified form as the “Old Babylonian” version of the epic, now in Akkadian. But the long version, with significant additional material, in particular the Noah’s ark story for which the rest of the epic becomes a frame, comes to us from yet a thousand years later. A thousand! It was collected and archived by one of the very last kings of Assyria, who had an antiquarian bent and was trying to do honor to the ancient culture of his country. This version, the longest, most unified, most “literary” version, is attributed to a named author: Sin-leqe-unnini – someone who had probably lived 600 years earlier. Sort of a Homer to this Odyssey. But my point is, this story and its “author” were as remote as Homer seems now, to the Assyrians who wrote it down for us. And the age of Gilgamesh himself was unimaginably primitive to the people for whom this tale was a classic.

This is to say that there is an important cultural distinction to be made between the context of The Once and Future King (1958) and of the hypothetical historical King Arthur himself (~500 AD). Except for Gilgamesh it’s on an even grander scale.

I tried to keep all that in mind as we read. It seemed relevant for the same reason that it seems relevant to understanding the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) that the society that made it and enjoyed it was not actually living in castles and thatched roof cottages. The reason is the same: this isn’t one of those situations where we need to try to see past the period-ness of the text. Ancient and mysterious is part of the point. Moreso here than with the bible, even, I think, because so far as I know there were no ritual or religious reasons for this story to be kept around. It seems to have been deemed important mainly because it was good. It notably does not include any “begats” – no genealogies or elaborate invocations or anything else that purports to be important in a way that transcends the story itself. It is appealingly earthy and unpretentious.

Gilgamesh is a young hotshot king of Uruk. He’s two-thirds god, one-third man, which is an interesting breakdown. He’s a little larger than life and he lives life a little too large for the people of Uruk, sleeping with every bride and overworking the military men. The people pray that a proper match for his energies come and carry off some of the burden of dealing with this guy, so the gods create Enkidu, his perfect companion, who enters the world in a state of complete nature, hairy, naked, living like a gazelle in the wild. A plot is hatched to civilize the wild man by sending out one of the temple prostitutes (temples were different back then) into the wild to tempt him. He lies with her, as they say, for a long time, and when he gets up the gazelles flee from him – he’s gained the knowledge of the civilized world. He learns how to drink from a glass and things like that and then goes to the city to confront Gilgamesh. They have a big superhero fight and become best friends.

That’s the first section of the story, at least the way it breaks down in my head, and maybe my favorite part. There’s something very touching to me about Enkidu’s state of innocence being as a gazelle, and that he is civilized by sex with a woman from the city who has come to teach him, and then his friends the gazelles run away, and then he has to learn to deal with a knife and fork – this is much more resonant and interesting, not to mention warm, than the comparatively frowny, nervous story about the snake and the apple, which covers the same mythic territory and for all we know may be obliquely descended from this story. There’s also something sweet about the idea that Gilgamesh is only a tyrant because he has not been properly matched with companions and goals big enough for him; that the people cry out to the gods not to kill their terrible king but to make a best friend for him.

I tried for a while to think of what contemporary story is like Gilgamesh but nothing quite fits the bill. The idea that ran through my head while I was reading it, though, is that the oldest story in literature is sort of a buddy movie. But it gets more complicated than that.

Gilgamesh then announces his desire to achieve fame by taking on great tasks, and sets out with Enkidu to the great cedar forest that is guarded by the terrible monster Humbaba. They eventually succeed at bringing down Humbaba, who begs for mercy in the end. Enkidu warns Gilgamesh not to fall for it and they kill him. They chop down a bunch of cedars and use them to build a gate for Uruk. When they return to Uruk, the goddess Ishtar notices how hot and famous Gilgamesh is and invites him to be her lover, but he says no, that she’s spiteful and selfish. This angers her so much that she releases the Bull of Heaven, which storms around Uruk until Gilgamesh and Enkidu bring it down, thus achieving more fame.

The last section is the most important and gives the story its literary weight. One day Enkidu has a dream that the gods have decided the two need to be punished for their overreaching and have decided Enkidu must die. Gilgamesh tries to comfort him by doing honor to him and reassuring him about his achievements, but Enkidu is more than a little bitter – death is unfair. Then he dies. Gilgamesh is shaken and goes out wandering the countryside in grief, obsessed by the idea that he too is going to die some day. There is one ancient wise man who was granted eternal life by the gods – Gilgamesh goes on a long, increasingly mystical journey to the end of the world, where the wise man lives, to find out what he knows. When he finally gets there, there is a series of “punchlines,” each of which has a shaggy-dog quality. First off, the wise man tells him that there’s no way to live forever, and that he should just be happy that he’s lucky enough to be Gilgamesh. Then he tells Gilgamesh that he himself is only immortal because… and then he tells the story of Noah’s ark, from the point of view of Noah. At the end the gods make him immortal. Then he tells Gilgamesh that if he really wants to be immortal, he first has to stay awake for six days, at which Gilgamesh prompty falls asleep for six days. Then, as Gilgamesh is leaving, the wise man says, okay, I’ll let you in on a secret: there’s a plant at the bottom of the river that will keep you young forever. Gilgamesh swims down, pulls it up, and sets out for home, but at the first rest stop, a snake swims up and steals the plant from him while he’s bathing. This turns out to be why snakes can shed their skins. Gilgamesh returns home empty-handed and the story ends as it began, with some words in praise of how well-built and impressive Uruk is.

So, ultimately, this is a story about confronting the fear, and the inevitability, of death. The more you think about it, the more it seems appropriate that this is our oldest story. In fact, I was struck by how rare it is to come across a treatment of death that seems so accessible and real, in literature. Somewhere in European history, the idea of death got caught up with all sorts of other ideals, and now, in most fiction, death carries some romantic baggage that has nothing to do with the way I fear my own death in real life, or the deaths of people I am close to. On the cover of the New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago, in the review of Cormac McCarthy’s unbearably grim-sounding new book, the reviewer says that McCarthy, quote, “has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious.” I thought of Gilgamesh. Death in Gilgamesh is something recognizable. Gilgamesh goes on a quest to save himself from it that has a big shrug at the end of it. I recognize that from black humor, but this isn’t humor and it also isn’t black. The deadpan ending, extolling the high-quality bricks of Uruk, is not a slap in the face. It’s just not reassurance either; or, rather, it’s reassurance in terms of everything we can be reassured about, which is life, not death.

Gilgamesh’s grief for Enkidu is simple and believable. It’s very affecting that the fairy-tale constructions (everyone tends to say things three or more times) are here put in the service of a basic emotion that for whatever reason isn’t a big one in the European tradition – fear of death. Gilgamesh says that he saw a worm fall from the dead Enkidu’s nose, and, more or less, that it really freaked him out. He tells this to everyone he meets.

The more I write it here, the more it’s starting to bother me. Why has fear of death been so marginalized and degraded? Talk of “cowardice” and “immortal souls” and whatnot have usurped our commiserating about something that is the thing for humans to commiserate over. Gilgamesh offers that and it offers it in a very unassuming, accessible way.

In general, this was an interesting read because it offered access to the mindset of an alternate, to-me-unknown culture, the attitudes of which seemed to me immediately interesting and applicable, in the way that some people are innately drawn to “Eastern thought” or whatever. This Sumerian worldview – though, let me be clear, intensely foreign and peculiar – made more immediate human sense to me than the ancient Chinese worldview or the ancient Egyptian worldview, etc. Insofar as I’ve been exposed to those.

Another interesting thing about reading something this old and this foreign is that the degrading effect of all that time is unavoidably relevant to the task: it’s full of holes and question marks. “Gap of about 40 lines” is an extremely mysterious and evocative thing to encounter in a story you’re reading. You get good at guessing what goes in the gaps that only affect half of a line, and then you start to know what’s going on even when several sentences are missing. And then you get to one of the really big gaps and you have to concede defeat to the chipping of clay over thousands of years, which is bigger than any of us. A bit like death.

So. We finished that and returned to the US, and then I found out that Harold Bloom actually specifies that he recommends the version of Gilgamesh translated by David Ferry. So I went to the New York Public Library and got out a copy of it. Second image in there. This I read over a weekend trip to the Jersey shore. I don’t recommend it. To me it’s a case against Harold Bloom, in fact. David Ferry’s version is not a translation of the Akkadian – he doesn’t read Akkadian. He made a version based on prior word-for-word translations, with heavy poetic license. In heroic couplets. Why, you might ask, is it in heroic couplets? Because for some people, iambic pentameter is a necessary adjunct to seriousness. Why such people would want to read anything from ancient Sumer is not clear to me. The philosophy behind turning Gilgamesh into something that feels European and familiar goes entirely against the grain of everything I enjoyed in reading the story in the first place. Whatever survives of its peculiar attitude and peculiar origins have been transmogrified, here, into some kind of intentional (and thus condescending) primitivism. Furthermore, I just don’t feel like Ferry got it. There’s a big chunk of stone on the cover (condescending primitivism?) but on every level the actual text has been made more elaborate, more involved. 50% of the content has been put in the work’s mouth, as it were, by someone who thinks he’s walking in step with it but is actually riding in his own anachronistic horse and buggy. Surely Harold Bloom wanted us to read Gilgamesh and not the minor contemporary poet David Ferry. I don’t think he knew what he was talking about. Maybe he had political reasons for putting Ferry’s name in there. Or, more likely and more dismaying, maybe he’s one of these people who gets a kick out of iambic pentameter no matter what the occasion because it reminds him of Great Things like Shakespeare, with all the curlicues that that entails.

It may be worth noting that the Stephen Mitchell Gilgamesh, published in 2004 (Bloom’s Canon is from 1994) has praise from Bloom on the back cover calling it “certainly the best that I have seen in English.” So perhaps we can take that to be a revised recommendation. I haven’t read the Mitchell version but it looks fairly tasteful.

Then I was walking near a flea market here in Brooklyn and on the first table I passed there was a copy of the old Penguin edition of Gilgamesh as rendered in prose by N.K. Sandars. Third image there. I think I got it for $2. This one is still in print, with a slightly different cover and several further stages of revision, but I got a 1964 copy. I can endorse it as having a very good (and very long) introduction, offering a lot of context, and having been done intelligently. As The Times Literary Supplement is quoted on the back cover: “The work of synthesis has been accomplished, and with a remarkable degree of tact and imagination.” Exactly. This version fills gaps and makes guesses, but they’re smart guesses. We can tell that Sandars gets the big picture, so we’re willing to trust her choices. But I wouldn’t recommend this as a first read. Knowing where the gaps are and that they exist is part of what makes it acceptable to read the version where they’ve been spackled up.

Honestly, if I had to recommend a version, I’d recommend the other Penguin edition, translated by Andrew George. This one’s the most widespread these days anyway. I haven’t read it all the way through, but I’ve spent some time with it, and George’s notes are the most helpful of any of the versions I’ve found, his presentation the most inviting, and most importantly, his translation the clearest of the “faithful” translations. He also includes all the major alternate/earlier versions of the stories. Dalley’s version is actually very similar in approach and has the benefit of including several other interesting Myths from Mesopotamia, but phrase for phrase, George’s reads just a tad smoother.

This whole issue of how to deal with such an alien, broken-up text started to interest me in itself, so I’ve been collecting the same excerpt from all the versions I could find. The next post will be all of those in a row. I think it makes clear why the Ferry version is not the one to read. Let me know if you’ve got a version I should add. That post will also include links to online versions of Gilgamesh if anyone’s read this far and maintained enough interest to want to read it.

Finally, when I was at the Brooklyn Library getting out the next book in this project (10 billion points if anyone guesses it correctly! 10 billion) I saw that they had a recording of Bohuslav Martinů’s 1955 oratorio of Gilgamesh, so I got that out too. The last image up there. It’s terrific! Really. I only knew Martinů’s můsic from one quirky piano work – which I always really liked – and Gilgamesh shows a much broader expressive range. Composers responding to literary works tend to exaggerate and simplify, but I found this extremely sensitive and intelligent, retaining both the humanity and the strangeness of the text. It also is interesting in that it uses a lot of tropes from movie music in a much more engaging, satisfying way. Martinů eliminates much of the story (no quest for fame) and replaces the wise man with an invented segue to the story of the 12th tablet, which all the translators point at as a distinct and unrelated addition to the main text, wherein Enkidu dies differently and then is made to rise from the dead so that he can report eerily on what things are like in the underworld. Martinů makes it work, but again, probably not the best place to start with this story.

Word on the internet is that this isn’t the best of the three or four recordings available. Oh well. Here’s a quick sound sample for you.

We were in our little room in Edinburgh, in August, and Beth was trying to take a nap but was having trouble falling asleep. I said, “I’ll read you the great books, that’ll help you fall asleep.” I went to Google, typed in “great books,” clicked on one of the top hits, and found myself at this weird, proud little site. “Okay, here we go,” I said, and launched into the first thing on the chronological list, The Code of Hammurabi. Now, the Code of Hammurabi is an odd choice for a list of “great books,” and I didn’t even make it through the opening invocation before Beth made me stop – it wasn’t helping anyone fall asleep – but still, I started thinking, “Why haven’t I ever actually read this before? I’ve heard about it for years, and all I had to do was go online and I could read it. Just like everything else on that list. I only have one life to either read these things or not read them. And look, I’m not doing anything else right now. We’re just sitting here. I really should be reading the great books.”

The peculiar list at that site, however, wouldn’t do. After not very much searching, I found myself at this satisfying page, which compiles several prominent lists of “The Great Books” or the like, and has indexed them to allow comparison. Obviously, I had to pick one of these lists. In the end, much though I hate Harold Bloom, I ended up choosing his “Western Canon” list, as copied out on this page. For one thing, it had more recent works and more ancient works than most of the other lists. For another thing, it simply had more works. Somehow, since actually completing any of these reading lists is of course absolutely impossible, this seemed to at least promise greater variety. Bloom also prefaces his list with: “Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest,” which seemed reassuring.

The idea of starting from, say, Hammurabi’s Code and then reading forward through time was part of what had excited me, but after a moment’s thought I realized that this would kill the project – by measuring my progress, making me resent my infinite task rather than savor it. Plus it would just mean that for the forseeable future, I’d be reading ancient works only. No thanks. Still, the idea of starting at the beginning appealed to me. So the first work would be, according to Bloom’s list (and several others): Gilgamesh.

I copied the list from that webpage into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is 2535 rows long. There are not nearly this many works on the list – each author’s name appears on its own row prior to his/her works, and there are several headings and subheadings too. Not that it matters. The plan is this: after finishing each work, I go to www.random.org and generate a random integer from 1 to 2535. If I land on a heading, I roll again. If I land on any work by an author with several works listed, I read the first unread work by that author – this it to prevent my reading minor or supplementary works prior to the more important ones, which generally seem to be listed first. Same goes if I land on the author’s name itself. Obviously, if I land on a work I’ve already read, I roll again. Though we’ll have to see what happens if I land on something I only read in high school and don’t really remember or feel that I understood. Probably I’ll just read it.

Bloom’s list forms an extended appendix to his book The Western Canon, and there is slightly more detail given there than on the web page where I found it. For one thing, he frequently names editions and translations. As I do not own and have no desire to buy Bloom’s book, I have been conferring with the Amazon “search inside this book” feature to get what I need in this respect.

So those are the rules. At this point, a couple busy months later, I’ve rolled three times. The process has been great. I’m not sure this is going to make me a well-read person, but it’s certainly intellectually rewarding. If the purpose of reading is to widen your range of experience, truly random great works are a pretty good way of ensuring that you choose independent of any prior inclination or bias. If the purpose of reading is entertainment, I’ve also been thoroughly entertained. So that’s win/win so far.

What I’m going to do when I hit things like “Complete Works,” which appears for several authors, is not so clear. We’ll cross that when we come to it.

This is all as prologue to my talking about the works I’ve read thus far. First up: Gilgamesh! Which I finished more than a month ago. But you’ll still have to gimme a day or two to throw something together. Or more maybe.