In Memory: Gilgamesh, RD, All of You and Me

Today is Sunday, 13 August 2006.

Elias Canneti died, this date 1994.

Thanks to him, I really got, for the first time, The Epic of Gilgamesh.

It’s a good thing.

The following is from the 1970 verse narrative version, by Herbert Mason:

Enkidu, the friend of Gilgamesh, is dying.

“Everything had life to me, Gilgamesh heard his friend Enkidu murmur,
The sky, the storm, earth, water, wandering,
The moon and its three children, salt, even my hand
Had life.
Enkidu looked at his friend, Gilgamesh, and said,
“You will be left alone, unable to understand
In a world where nothing lives anymore
As you thought it did.
…
Enkidu drew closer to his friend’s face.
“My pain is that my eyes and ears
No longer see and hear the same
As yours do. Your eyes have changed.
You are crying.
You never cried before,
It’s not like you.

Why am I to die,
You to wander on alone?
Is that the way it is with friends?

Gilgamesh sat hushed as his friend’s eyes stilled.
In his silence he reached out
To touch the friend whom he had lost.”