The Harps That Once...: Sumerian Poetry in Translation

An excellent work of scholarship. Jacobsen's 500-page collection features wonderful footnotes, and organizes the poetry with marginal subtitles, making reading much easier. The writings here are diverse and delightful.

What I was hoping for was translations that were slightly conservative, more concerned with accuracy than whether or not readers were on the edge of their seats. I wanted someone with a good handle on poetry, but not someone who used an ancient work as a springboard or departure point for their own jazzed-up, modern re-creations. (Worst case example: someone's translation of Gilgamesh describing a wave of water as "Manhattan-high." Are you kidding me?) Thus, I was delighted with Jacobsen's work. He describes his own attempts in this way: "The translations have been kept as literal, and held as close to the wording of the Sumerian original, as at all possible." Other reviewers have listed what he includes, but let me point out what he does not, just as full disclosure. The book does not include debates, royal hymns, Edubba texts, proverbs and wisdom literature, fables such as "the sorcerer from Aratta," or Gilgamesh texts. But before reading this book, I first recommend Samuel Noah Kramer's "Sumerians" or "History Begins at Sumer," as well as Marc Van De Mieroop's "History of the Ancient Near East." As a follow-up to "Harps" I suggest "Before the Muses" by Benjamin Foster, which picks up with Akkadian (Babylonian) literature where this book leaves off. The poems in "The Harps That Once" can sometimes be quite lively. In the "Ninurta Myth," the winged warrior god and his intelligent, animated weapon (changes from a mace to a lion-headed eagle) do battle with a supernatural villain named Azag - a sort of giant cedar that walks on his roots - and his army of animated boulders. That said, these archaic writings are fourteen centuries older than Homer, but if you have an especially short attention span, you're probably not reading these posts in the first place. Enjoy!

As the oldest body of literature in the world, Sumerian poetry represents man's first adaptation of writing to express ideas and beliefs far more complex than the "highly structured" applications such as accounting for which writing was originally invented. Many people believe that the ideas and mythological figures present in Sumerian poetry are echoed in the later traditions of Ancient Greece, Ancient Israel, and even Christianity. Clearly then, any person interested in the history of Western literature would be doing themselves a great disservice by ignoring their Sumerian origins. The book is divided into eight parts: (1) Dumuzi Texts, (2) Royal Lovesongs, (3) Hymns to Gods, (4) Myths, (5) Epics, (6) Admonitory History, (7) Hymns to Temples, and (8) Laments for Temples. Thorkild Jacobsen describes most of the Sumerian literary corpus as being works of praise, such as to a god, a king, or a dead relative. Instead of describing human feelings or ambitions, most of these works serve a ceremonial purpose or are explanations for why the world is the way it is. As a result, many of the poems in this book can be difficult to connect with, since they are taken out of context. Although written down on clay tablets, Jacobsen and others have suggested that Sumerian literature was meant to be narrated orally. As such, an element that is missing from our modern translation is the narrator's embellishment of the story through improvisation, voice intonation, and body language/facial expression. Nevertheless, it is still possible to get a glimpse into the mindset of the ancient Mesopotamians by reading their literature. The ancient Mesopotamians considered themeselves to have been created by the gods for the express purpose of serving them hand and foot. Apart from this, they had no reason to be. I felt that much of the poetry found in Jacobsen's book represented the Sumerians' desire to maintain the status quo through praise of the gods, currying their favor, and begging for mercy. "The Harps That Once..." is a fine anthology of Sumerian literature and I would heartily recommend the book to anyone interested in sampling the literature of ancient Mesopotamia. I would also recommend "The Epic of Gilgamesh" translated by Andrew George (2003) (ISBN 0140449191) since it contains five of the Sumerian Gilgamesh stories, which complement nicely the collection represented in Jacobsen's book.

THE HARPS THAT ONCE . . . Sumerian Poetry in Translation. Translated by Thorkild Jocobsen. 498 pp. New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-300-07278-3 (pbk.)I currently have three anthologies of Sumerian-Akkadian literature on my shelves: Stephanie Dalley's 'Myths from Mesopotamia' (1989), Benjamin R. Foster's 'From Distant Days : Myths, Tales, and Poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia' (1995), and the present book. All three are by specialists and are designed for the general reader; all, within the limits of their shared conventional viewpoint, are excellent; and anyone with a serious interest in this remote and fascinating literature will want to have all three. The fact that all three are by specialists, however, raises a problem. For what it means is that we are being given is the official, orthodox, and, as it were, sanitized view of this literature, one based on a general consensus of academics as to what it is about and what its words mean.Although I'm not a specialist myself but merely an enthusiastic Sumerophile, it's generally understood that knowledge of Sumerian and Akkadian is still in an imperfect state, and that 'definitions' of words in these languages should not be seen as fixed and more or less final, as they are in languages such as Latin or Greek, but should rather be seen as currently fashionable educated guesses by specialists, guesses which may turn out to be wrong. Personally I doubt very much that the use by these writers of the word "gods," for example, accurately reflects what the ancients really meant. I also find their use of the word "myth" highly questionable, since I think that the poems and stories we are dealing with, far from being mere "myths" or falsehoods, are in fact a distant echo of events that actually occurred in history. In other words, various and sometimes rather subtle kinds of scholarly distortion, a distortion which could be quite _innocent_ in intent, can creep into translations, and we cannot afford to assume that what is on the page must be right since a specialist put it there. Let me repeat that I'm not accusing Sumerologists and Assyriologists of being scoundrels. I'm merely suggesting that in a field as complex and filled with difficulties as this, there will always be room for alternative views, views such as those of linguist and scholar Zecharia Sitchin whose '12th Planet' everyone who is interested in Sumer should read.An extreme example of the sort of 'distortion' I am talking about occurs in Jacobsen's translation of 'Inanna's Descent.' Here are a few lines from the opening, with my obliques added to indicate line breaks:"Inanna had / from the upper heaven / her heart set / on the netherworld. / My lady forsook heaven, / forsook earth, / went down into Hades" (page 207).My questions are these: Is this a 'myth' or a poetic account of an actual historical event? Are Inanna and the other "gods" really "gods," or are they the living flesh-and-bloo

Sumerian texts, particularly poetry, are arguably the most difficult texts to translate. However, Dr. Jacobsen performs with extreme expertise in rendering the flow and feeling of these texts into english. One of the finest Sumerologists of the 20th century, Jacobsen brings a long dead culture to life. Very enjoyable to read and provided with detailed explanations of concepts. Mythological literature is also included.