From 'Technicians of the Sacred Expanded': 'Genesis Three' (Enuma Elish), with commentary
Translation from Old Babylonian by Harris Lenowitz
When sky above had no name
earth beneath no given name
APSU the first their seeder
Deepwater
TIAMAT
Saltsea their mother who bore them
mixed waters
Before pasture held together
thicket be found
no gods being
no names for them
no plans
the gods were shaped inside them
LAHMU AND LAHAMU were brought out
named
while they grew
became great
ANSAR and KISAR were shaped
Skyline Earthline much greater
made the days long
added the years
ANU was their son
Sky their rival
ANSAR made his first son ANU his equal
Skyline Sky
ANU NUDIMMUD
and Sky got Manmaker equal
(EA)
NUDIMMUD
Manmaker
(EA) his fathers' boss
wide wise
full knowing
ANSAR strong
stronger than Skyline his father
no equal among his brother gods
The godbrothers together
stormed in TIAMAT
Salt sea
stirred up TIAMAT's guts
Saltsea
rushing at the walls
APSU
Not Deepwater hush their noise
TIAMAT
Salt sea struck dumb
They did bad things to her
acted badly, childishly
APSU
until Deepwater seeder of great gods
called up MUMMU
Speaker:
MUMMU
Speaker messenger makes my liver. happy
come! TIAMAT
Let's go see Saltsea
They went TIAMAT
sat down in front of Saltsea
(talk about plans for their first-born gods):
APSU
Deepwater opened his mouth said
to TIAMAT said loud:
Saltsea
"The way they act makes me sick:
during the day no rest
at night no sleep
I'll destroy them!
stop their doings!
It'll be quiet again we can sleep”
TIAMAT
When Saltsea heard this
she stormed
yelled at her husband
was sick
alone:
"Wipe out what we made?!
The way they act is a pain
but let's wait"
MUMMU APSU
Speaker answered advising Deepwater: MUMMU
bad advice Speaker's
ill-meant
"Go onl
Put an end to their impertinence
then
rest during the day
sleep at night”
When APSU heard him
Deepwater his face gleamed
for the hurts planned
against his godsons
hugged MUMMU
Speaker
set him in his lap
kissed him
What they planned in conference was repeated to their first born
godsons
They wept
milled around distressed
kept silence
COMMENTARY
Source: Translation from Enuma Elish by Harris Lenowitz, originally published in Acheringa/Ethnopoetics, new series, vol. 1, no. 1, 1975, pp. 31-33, & later in H. Lenowitz & Charles Doria: Origins: Creation Texts from the Ancient Mediterranean (Doubleday & Company, New York, 1975).
(1) The god-world of Enuma Elish starts in turbulence & struggle: a universe the makers/poets knew or dreamed-into-life & felt the terror/horror at its heart. It is this rush & crush of primal elements the poetry here translates into gods & monsters, reflecting as it does a natural & human world in chaos/turmoil. The scene it leaves for us, replete with names of gods & powers, follows a story line encountered in many other times & places. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, tracing back to still earlier Sumerian sources, the two primeval forces are the god Apsu (Deepwater/Freshwater) & the goddess Tiamat (Saltsea), whose offspring will eventually destroy them both & lead the way for the triumphant reign of the new god Marduk, killing the goddess off at last & using her severed corpse to form the earth & sky, with humans coming in their wake. The ferocity of word & image remains a key to poetic mind both then & now: the dark side of the joy & beauty that would be needed too to make their world & ours complete.
(2) “The Babylonian Creation Myth ... relates how the universe evolved from nothingness to an organized structure with the city of Babylon at its center. When the primordial sweet and salt waters – male Apsu and female Tiamat – mingled, two beings appeared, Lahmu and Lahamu, that is, mud and muddy. The image suits the southern Babylonian view over the Persian Gulf perfectly: when the sea recedes, mud arises. A chain reaction had started [...]” (Mark Van De Mieroop, Philosophy Before the Greeks: The Pursuit in Ancient Babylonia, 2016, p.4)
And further: “The ancient Babylonians certainly were not humanists but deeply committed to a theocentric view of the world. Yet, they believed that humans could have a firm knowledge of reality as the gods had created it, and continued to direct it, because at the time of creation the gods had provided the tools for understanding, as the Enūma Eliš shows. Creation in that myth was a work of organization: Marduk did not fashion the universe ex nihilo. Rather, he created by putting order into the chaos of Tiamat’s bodily parts. And just as he ordered the physical world, he organized knowledge and structured it through writing [...] the Babylonian theory of knowledge was [...] fundamentally rooted in a rationality that depended on an informed reading. Reality had to be read and interpreted as if it were a text. [...] ‘I read, therefore I am’ could be seen as the first principle of Babylonian epistemology.” (Ibid, p.10)
(3) “What’s presented here, the Babylonian genesis retold, is the paramount interest, & the work of the ones who present it is an interest almost equal; & all of it crucial to the unfolding, changing recovery of cultures & civilizations that has now entered its latest phase. To bring across this sense of myth as process & conflict, Harris Lenowitz & Charles Doria, working as both poets & scholars in Origins, make use of all those ‘advances in translation technique, notation, & sympathy’ developed over the last half century, from the methods of ‘projective verse’ to those of etymological translation or of that recovery of the oral dimension of the poem that the present editor & others have, wisely or not, spoken of elsewhere as ‘total translation.’ The picture that emerges is one of richness, fecundity at every turning, from the first image of poem on page to the constantly new insights into the possibilities of ‘origin.’ And this allows that ‘clash of symbols’ which, those like Paul Ricoeur tell us, is both natural to mind & forms its one sure hedge against idolatry.” (Adapted from J.R. in the pre-face to Origins, 1975)
(4) “We live in an age in which inherited literature is being hit from two sides, from contemporary writers who are laying bases of new discourse at the same time that ... scholars ... are making available pre-Homeric and pre-Mosaic texts which are themselves eye-openers.” (Charles Olson, “Homer & Bible,” 1957)
N.B. In the translation, above, god names are underlined throughout, with the English translation directly beneath.
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