What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Again, but made modern,
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,

Gilgamesh again. But a very different Gilgamesh. The version I sent you two weeks ago took liberties, but the better to serve the original Sumerian classic. One senses that Stephen Mitchell took the broken clay tablets, fitted the pieces together and then adeptly filled in where the cracks made it hard to read. Our guide on that breathless trip across five thousand years to the banks of the Euphrates remained egoless and anonymous. Of Mitchell, we sensed nothing; in fact, we didn’t even think to enquire about him.

With Gilgamesh as interpreted by the Canadian poet Derrek Hines, the time travel is in the opposite direction. It’s Mesopotamia that’s yanked into the present day, every speck of archaeological dust blown off. This version is all about liberties, and the clay tablets have been thrown out. Take the opening lines. In the Mitchell version, they go:

Surpassing all kings, powerful and tall
beyond all others, violent, splendid,
a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader,
hero in the front lines, beloved by his soldiers—
fortress they called him, protector of the people,
raging flood that destroys all defences—
two-thirds divine and one-third human…

With Hines, we get:

Here is Gilgamesh, king of Uruk:
two-thirds divine, a mummy’s boy,
zeppelin ego, cock like a trip-hammer,
and solid chrome, no-prisoners arrogance.

Get the picture? You don’t want to read the versions in the wrong order. With the Mitchell, the scope, the vastness, the timelessness of an ancient epic is felt. With the Hines, you might wonder where the epic went. What’s all this riffing? Well, that’s it, the riffing is the point. Remember Ishtar’s anger when Gilgamesh rejects her, how she goes to her father, the god Anu, wanting to borrow the Bull of Heaven so that she can unleash it on Uruk? This is what Hines makes of it, Ishtar speaking:

‘I’ll have the Bull of Heaven or I’ll unzip Hell,
and free the un-dead to suck frost into the living.’

Then, on a pulse, an actor’s mood change—
she, pouting: ‘Darling Anu,
you know how I’m insulted;
I want, want the Bull of Heaven
to revenge my honour.’

She lifts a perfect foot to stamp,
and the tiles of Heaven’s floor in rivalry
shift like a Rubik cube to receive it.

It’s Gilgamesh meets Naomi Campbell. Besides the Rubik cube, there are a great many other un-Mesopotamian references in the text: atomic blasts, Brueghel, buildings in New York, CAT-scans, event horizons, express trains, Marlene Dietrich, oxygen masks, paparazzi, Swiss bank accounts, X-rays, the Wizard of Oz, and so on. This joy in the anachronistic bears witness to the very different approach that Hines takes.

All things are met and understood through one mind, the one we have. Timelessness, transcendence, the evanescence of the ego—these are true, but they are not what we experience. They were neither felt by Gilgamesh, nor are they felt by us. We are not all one. We are just one, each on our own. You, me, him, her, six billion times over. Each one of us has a blip note of mortality. It’s only when the blips are put together that we seem to hear a symphony throbbing down through time. Mitchell’s version of Gilgamesh plays on that symphony. He makes the epic new, but it works because we know it’s old. Hines wants none of this hand-me-down worth. He’s a modern; this blip here and now will speak freshly for that old, fifty-century-old blip. With Hines you get the singularity of the living poet expressing himself in his own right, drawing attention to himself, saying “This is me, this is our language, this is our condition—whaddya think?”

I think it’s very good. A harder read than the Mitchell, for sure. At times, the poetic pithiness requires work to unpack. Then in the next stanza, a startling image makes perfect sense. Which is why I would recommend that you read the Hines more than once. It’s only sixty pages, and well-spaced at that. The more familiar you are with it, the more it will make sense, and soon enough you will have furnished a beautiful room in your mind. It’s a rich, exciting text, with some stabbingly brilliant lines. Take this, part of Gilgamesh’s lament upon Enkidu’s death:

The complaisant dead inch away,
dislocating the shared vanishing point
of our perspective,
and we struggle to repaint the picture.

A last example. Gilgamesh, after getting “snake-drunk” and losing the herb of eternal life, returns to Uruk to die. He has this to say:

We are made and broken on a miracle
we look on and cannot see—as though
we had sold out instinct to thought
blinding us to what the world is,
the heart’s gate to eternity.

That is a truth very old and, here, totally modern.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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