Gilgamesh and the Order of a Manuscript

I’m reveling in a relatively new translation of Gilgamesh by Sophus Helle (Yale University Press, 2021), both for the energy and music of this translation of the epic, and for the essays that accompany the translation. Helle’s essay “Study the Brickwork” does a brilliant job of outlining the meticulous structure of the epic in the “Standard Babylonian” version that culminated centuries of renditions of the stories and retellings about the hero-King and his beloved friend Enkidu.

The structure is a circle, beginning in triumph and ending in tragedy and beginning and ending with the walls of Gilgamesh’s city of Uruk. The epic is further split into two mirroring halves, centering on the only other scene in which the walls of Uruk are central.

The epic was written in cuneiform on twelve Tablets, with the turning point at the end of Tablet VI, the midpoint of the narrative. Helle describes each tablet as akin to “the episodes of a modern television series. Each Tablet contains a separate story, a rounded episode. Of course the Tablets still combine to form a larger story…” Further, many of the Tablets reflect physical borders containing their episode – entering and leaving the Cedar Forest at the beginning and end of one Tablet, for example. The extensive repetition in the epic acts much like a chorus in a song, a familiar touchstone (forgive the pun) that creates delay and tension in the action of the narrative. This repetition, and the exquisite structuring of the epic, reminds me of the artistry of Haida storytellers, wonderfully and lovingly explored in Robert Bringhurst’s A Story as Sharp as a Knife (Douglas & McIntyre, 2013).

What does the structure of Gilgamesh have to do with the order of a manuscript? Our poems are the bricks of our walls, and our work in crafting a manuscript is to find the pattern of brickwork that makes of our poems the strongest wall we can. It is a sort of meta-writing, where instead of composing with individual words, we are composing with poems. We may want the pattern to be subtle or very clear, and it may be more intuitive or more rationally-conceived. For example, our poems may map a narrative arc of transformation through the experience of grief – this implies a roughly chronological structure, but one that may have recursive elements, the same way that grief is recursive.

If we find that some poems group well into sections – whether conceptual, musical, narrative or otherwise coalescing – we will want the sections to feel like a Tablet, complete in and of themselves while still contributing to the overall arc of our manuscript.

The ear and the brain are very sensitive to pattern, and we don’t have to use large gestures to create a sense of order in our manuscript. If one poem leads sonically to the next, and if the first, central, and final poems speak clearly to one another with some kind of pattern that conveys a sense of beginning, middle, and end, we are likely to be well on our way to creating a very satisfying manuscript.

I’ll be continuing to think about ways to find the meta-structure between poems in composing manuscripts, and I welcome your thoughts!

Image from the British Museum