On First Looking into Mitchell's "Gilgamesh"

If the truth were known, I didn't really like Gilgamesh, or at least not this version, which is required reading in one of my college classes. With the poetic touch, it would have been lovely, and the blurbs on the back jacket promised a "eloquent and nuanced" version, even a definitive version. One professor of religion even went so far as to write, "Reading Stephen Mitchell's marvelously clear and vivid rendering makes me feel that I am encountering Gilgamesh for the first time", so unfortunately I came into it expecting some emotion akin to what Keats felt gazing into Chapman's Homer. This wasn't a fair thing to expect, since I wasn't familiar with Gilgamesh to begin with, but there you go.

As it was, I had psyched myself up to look at Mitchell's version with a wild surmise, and instead I found myself looking at a weird, clumsily-written myth, sort of the pre-Biblical equivalent of those 80s cartoons meant to market a toy line, or maybe one of those action flicks with barbarians and scantily-clad goddesses. My guess is that, as a girl, I just didn't get it. There's testosterone in every line of the tetrameter.

Gilgamesh is a warrior king whom no one dares oppose, and he's begun to abuse his power, treading on the lowly and taking what he pleases. The gods hear the cries of his people and, in the quaint manner of fictional immortals, rig up a solution which doesn't address the problem, but which is perfect for the necessary plot. We don't know why playing games with love potion will help Oberon steal the changeling boy from Titania, and we don't know why creating a man with identical strength to Gilgamesh to be his best friend will make him less of a tyrant. (Wouldn't you think they'd just team up and conquer the rest of the known world?) But the gods are clearly above our mortal mindset, because it works in both cases.

Even though I'm not a fan of Mitchell's brand of poetry--deliberately unrhythmic, with a bland Good News Bible-esque sense of paraphrase--I do appreciate the grasp of myth I'm getting. For instance, the rule of mythology seems to be that once you've duked it out with a man of equal or lesser strength, you must become his ally. It happens again with Robin Hood and Little John. There's even a parodic echo of it in P.G. Wodehouse's Mike and Psmith, in which the animosity between two schoolboys turns to friendship after it finally comes to blows. (Wodehouse, like many humorists, loved to draw the little spats and skirmishes of daily life along legendary lines.)

Mitchell's notes and analysis run to more pages than the poem itself; the book as a whole is basically a fat volume of synopsis on one side and a slim volume of sources on the other, with the poem pressed like a pamphlet in the middle. This is probably just as well, since Mitchell's analysis is superior to his poetics; he gives his breathless take on scene after scene, and it's hard not to get swept away by his enthusiasm, even when he brings in wrongheaded Biblical comparisons. (One famous portion of the book covers the Deluge, with animals, an ark and the last good man on earth, but nothing else in the text seems to bear relation to Genesis.) Mitchell believes that Gilgamesh, considered purely as a story, is superior to the Bible because of its lack of clearly drawn good vs. evil. Having read both, I believe that this is exactly what makes Gilgamesh inferior; with no sense of morality to color anyone's actions, there's little complexity and no real conflict other than monster-bashing. Beowulf was full of that kind of thing, and yet I love Seamus Heaney's Beowulf. I guess the lesson here is that story matters little; it's all about the wording.