What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
The oldest story in the world, to celebrate your second minority,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Congratulations on your electoral win. You must be pleased with your increased minority. What your continued tenure as prime minister means, among other things, is that our book club has survived. We can now really settle into this business of discussing books. Since we have more time, why don’t we go back in time. Why don’t we start where book talk probably started, along the banks of the river Euphrates. What has become known as the standard version of the epic of Gilgamesh was set down between the years 1300 and 1000 BCE in cuneiform on twelve clay tablets in Babylonian, a dialect of the Akkadian language. But earlier written fragments in Sumerian about the heartbroken king of Uruk date from around 2000 BCE, and the historical Gilgamesh, well, he died in about 2750 BCE, just a couple of centuries shy of five thousand years ago.

Gilgamesh predates Homer and predates the Bible. It is the cultural soil out of which these later texts emerged, which is why some elements in the epic will sound familiar to you. Before the biblical Flood there was the Great Flood in Gilgamesh. Before Noah’s Ark, there was the ship Utnapishtim built, crowded with animals. In Gilgamesh, there is an odyssey before the Odyssey and there is one who overcame mortality before Jesus of Nazareth overcame it. The theme of a terrible flood also finds itself echoed in the Hindu story of Matsya the fish, Vishnu’s first avatar, and the theme of fear will perhaps remind you of the Bhagavad-Gita, which I sent you last year. Remember Arjuna’s fear before the battle? It is not dissimilar to Gilgamesh’s fear before death. The inexorableness of fate might remind you of classical Greek thinking, just as the petulance of the Sumerian gods is much like that of the Greek gods. Gilgamesh is the mother of all stories. We, as literary animals, start with Gilgamesh.

That might make you think that reading the epic will be like staring into a display window of crude stone sculptures in an archaeology museum. Not so, I promise you, certainly not in the version of Gilgamesh that I’m sending you, by the American translator Stephen Mitchell. He’s done away with scholarly encrustations and dull fidelity to disjointed fragments (though, if you care, there is a good introduction and lots of notes). Mitchell has sought to be faithful to the spirit of the original, more mindful of the needs of the English reader than the sensibility of the archaeologist.

The result is exhilarating. The prose is simple, vigorous and stately, the action thrillingly dramatic. I encourage you to read the epic aloud. It’s an easy oral read, you will see. Your tongue will not trip, your mind will not stumble. Like the beating of a drum, the cadence of the beats and the repetition of some passages will hold you in thrall.

The mind can be immortal, living forever through ideas. An idea can leap from mind to mind, going down through the generations, forever keeping ahead of death. The mind of Plato, for example, is still with us, long dead though he is. But the heart? The heart is inescapably mortal. Every heart dies. Of Plato’s heart, its share of things felt, we know nothing. Gilgamesh is the story of one man’s heart and its breaking in the face of death. The emotional immediacy is palpable. Gilgamesh, king of great-walled Uruk, won’t seem alien to you because that aggrieved voice pleading directly in your ear isn’t from over four thousand years ago—it’s the pulsing of your own perishable heart. Our only hope is that we might live as authentically as Gilgamesh and find a friend as loving and loyal as Enkidu.

There are some lovely lines. Keep an eye out for “A gust of wind passed,” and “A gentle rain fell onto the mountains.” They glow within their context. And there is a snake that does Gilgamesh a bad turn. That too will be biblically familiar to you. This snake, though, does not proffer; it takes. But the result is the same: unhappy Gilgamesh must accept his fate as a mortal.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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