Lewis Turco is one of the great-undiscovered treasures of American
poetry: though those who really follow the scene know his work well, both as
poet and as critic. In that latter role, he has not only provided cogent
commentary on major poets and on the mode of poetry itself (and I say that
being a less ‘formalistic' reader myself than Turco is, but granting and
celebrating his percipience) but has also championed a major
early nineteenth-century American poet in Manoah Bodman. He has taught at SUNY
Oswego for many years and has been a vigorous and constructive participant on the
poetry scene. Though I know full well that Turco was born in 1934, that he was already
mature and established by the time I started reading him in the early 1980s, it
astonishes me to think of him as over eighty, as his work is not only still
buoyantly being produced but vitally contemporary: offering perspectives on imagination
just not available elsewhere.
Turco's latest book, The Hero Enkidu: An Epic, available on Amazon, is particularly timely, as we are all thinking
about Mesopotamian civilization in the light of the atrocities toward
archaeological remains in Iraq and Syria of the terrorist group calling itself
IS. Or at least we all should be. Sadly, many of the same people who celebrated
the movie The Monuments Men, about
the heroic attempts of a special detachment of the US Army to save European art
treasures both from Nazism and general wartime destruction, do not seem to give
a darn about these ancient Near Eastern antiquities, Not only are they so
remote from most of us, erected by people whose languages are no longer spoken
or known—not Arabs no more than they were Israelis—but the ancient Near Eastern monuments were built by
people often described as villains in the Bible, and under the aegis of harsh-ruling
kings whose combination of rigid authority and appreciation of artistic skill
and craft brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s dictum that every document of
civilization is also a document of barbarism. This is true of the history of Western
art works, often born of hierarchy and privilege. But in the Middle Eastern
context it is far more obvious, that we’ cared about Palmyra more than we’ did
about Hatra or Nimrud simply because Palmyra, architecturally, shows
Greco-Roman influence, and was influential on neoclassical architecture, is the
proof of this shameful bias. Western concern about Palmyra may have--knock on
wood—stopped the IS from utterly destroying it. But we should have spoken up
just as much for Hatra and Nimrud.
This Western bias against the ancient Near East has extended
even to the most prominent document of Mesopotamian civilization, the poem
called Gilgamesh. As the recent
scholarship of David Damrosch and Wai-Chee Dimock has shown, Gilgamesh has assumed privileged role in
accounts of 'world literature', and has in turn been translated by writers as
various gifts and dispositions as David Ferry, John Gardner/John Meier, Herbert
Mason, and, most recently, Stuart Kendall. As Michael Palma reminds us in his splendid
introduction to Turco’s book, the Gilgamesh poem has also inspired a
para-literature of epic, fantastic, and historically minded retellings.
One might see Turco’s focus on Enkidu, the best friend,
homosocial soulmate, and sidekick of our hero Gilgamesh, as simply another
instance of the various postmodern retellings of canonical stories from the
vantage point of subordinate or alternate points-of-view. But Turco is turning
to Enkidu for a different reason: to make sense of the tremendous distance
between us and the poem, or the cultural origins of the poem, as figured not
only by 'our’ indifference towards the terrorist atrocities in Iraq and Syria
but the way it is acceptable to be an intellectual in the humanities and have
near-complete ignorance of ancient Mesopotamia. For instance, a literate reader
of one of the translations mentioned above said to me, in deprecation of his
ultimate abilities to assess the translator’s achievement, that he did not know
the original Sanskrit! As if Sumerian was Sanskrit, a language that it has as
little relation to as it does to Sindarin!
Turco uses Enkidu as a prism through which to relate to the
poem: as Enkidu's earthiness, primal rage, and unbridled bundle of emotions are
closer to us psychologically than Gilgamesh’s heroism, always imbricated with
themes of piety to both his gods and his city, barriers that do not hinder our
view of Enkidu, wild, unfettered in Turco's words “hairy and naked” and thus
unacculturated in Mesopotamian civilization. With this psychological proximity,
Turco gives us verbal proximity: by making the bold, but infinitely successful,
decision to approach the material through the verse forms of Anglo-Saxon and
alliterative Middle English poetry.
Turco is not just making a a comment on the comparable ‘state’ of civilization
between the two cultures, but also providing a meditation on the possibility that Gilgamesh might have had, in
Mesopotamian culture, a similar role to what which Beowulf might have had in Anglo-Saxon culture. (We can never know, as both
works were rediscovered much later, after much of the other elements of the
literary corpus of those cultures had been lost). Though we actually are as
much at sea concerning the original date, author, or cultural purpose of Beowulf
as we are of Gilgamesh, we have linguistic connections to Beowulf we do not to
Gilgamesh, and even more to the Middle English alliterative corpus such as Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and
Turco’s verse maximizes these connections, especially in his deft use of
alliteration:
Nimrod entered
The fertile forest
And found the traps
That he had dug
Had all been filled
with soil and scrub;
Turco even uses rhyme at times. Even though this is highly
anachronistic, as rhyme only entered the Western tradition in the High Middle
Ages-the Greeks and Latin’s, as I discuss in chapter 4o of my recent book Barbarian Memory, did not use rhyme—it is our
primary mode of poetic coherence. Since Turco only uses rhyme sparingly and
tactically, it does not make the verse mawkish or clanging, as too much of it
might:
Enkidu stopped,
To stare,
astonished,
at this
wonder,
then
stood in sorrow,
in agony
and woe
to see
this man aglow
with
manliness as though
he were godlike crown to toe.
This is disciplined and
restrained, and coexists happily with the alliteration, blank verse, and Turco’s
own elegant attempt sot simulate the distich-structure of the Mesopotamian
originals (as the text was first written in Sumerian then 'adapted' into
Akkadian). The very end of the poem also rhymes in ways both apt and gratifying. My favorite mode, though, is the alliteration, which can capture ingenuous
cultural truths in a sly apothegm, as when the gods, Anu and Inanna, are called "sky sovereigns”:
simple, supple, and stark. In something i read by him in the 1980s, Turco pointed out that his middle name was Putnam, and that this was the same surname as that of George Puttenham, the great Elizabethan anatomist of metaphor. Turco's deft and seamless handling of figuration would have warmed the heart of his Elizabethan forebear.
There are some aspects of
Turco’s poem I could have done without-I did not liked the intrusion of Biblical
personages based on, but not themselves present in, Mesopotamian myths and histories
although this objection is merely “Johnsonian” on my part and not meant to be taken
as universal cavil. On the other hand I rather like the intrusion of Tolkienian
references, based on Tolkien’s use of “Erech”—the Hebrew rendering of “Gilgamesh's
home city and the version, rather than “Uruk”, employed by Turco—to the
resting-place of the Faithful Stone brought to Gondor by the Númenoranean exiles,
themselves fleeing from a flood much like the Gilgamesh story's Utnapishtim.
On their trek to Erech
Lilitu told
Enkidu the tale
of the city’s founding:
“In the second age
Isildur carried
Out of the ruins
of golden Númenor
A great globe
made of stone.
Upon the stone
he etched an oath
And caused the great
King of the Mountains
To place his hand
upon the rock
And swear that he
would bear fealty,
To Isildur’s lineage
and to Erech when
Its temple and walls
were raised upon
The crown of the hill.
I myself explore this
connection in my essay on Tolkien and
Mesopotamia in Jason Fisher’s Tolkien and the Study of His Sources. Turco uses
the Tolkien allusion to explore how the Gilgamesh story contains both history
and prehistory, both the human and the supernatural. Turco’s moving poem shows
how literature can be a bridge between the immortality Gilgamesh vainly seeks
and the frail mortality that envelops even the ferocious Enkidu:
When he saw its walls
He also saw
that they were hiss
Immortality,
for they would last
Eternally
Walls
can in fact be destroyed, as we have seen all too vividly recently, but the
stone tablets of the Gilgamesh story miraculously made it into the permanent
record, and Turco has given us a thoughtful, innovative, and perceptive
expansion on it, a contribution to he literary trove in its own resplendent
right.
