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Inanna, Gilgamesh, and Bruno Mars: Kim Echlin’s ongoing quest narrative

Inanna-Kim-EchlinEven the language of the poetry seems of the moment. Echlin maintains a fascination with what has come down to us as clichéd language: when Dumuzi expresses amazement at Inanna’s sensuality, the poet writes that his “jaw dropped in wonderment,” the first appearance of what is now a standard turn of phrase. And the incantatory repetition used in the poetry – an indication that these written stories arose out of an oral tradition and were likely intended as performance pieces – resembles nothing so much as modern pop lyrics. “When I was really detailing the love poetry and doing a lot of studying of the words and the language and so on,” Echlin says, “I was driving my teenage daughter around and we were listening to a lot of pop radio. Bruno Mars, and whoever it was at the time. And I’d be listening to the lyrics of these pop musicians. And the Sumerians had exactly the same thing to say about love.”

Well, maybe not exactly the same. Nowhere in the Bruno Mars catalogue (at least so far as I’m aware) does the singer declaim, “In the bedchamber dripping with honey / we will enjoy your allure.” Nor does pop music frequently traffic in the kind of sexual frankness found in the Inanna love poems: “Place your right hand / on my galla / put your left hand / under my head / bring your mouth close to my mouth / take my lips in your mouth.” The word galla refers to Inanna’s vulva, a term that has no literal translation in the original. “It was interesting in terms of translation issues,” Echlin says, “because there were no words for vulva, for clitoris – these things weren’t weighted with the years of weight that confines them [today]. So, that’s why I chose to use galla – to use their word – because that word, in that context, had no negative or pejorative weight. It was simply a body part, and celebratory. The context was celebratory. And that was pretty awesome.”

It is this enthusiasm for resonances and nuances across time and cultures that is most apparent when talking to Echlin about the ancient poetry. What separates and unites societies across a vast geography and thousands of years is a testament to the universality of the human condition, and is at the heart of the Inanna poems’ continued relevance for a contemporary audience.

“I would have these uncanny moments where I would be sitting with the texts, and they would feel like they were completely now,” Echlin says. “And to feel connected to a people – whose language you don’t know, whose culture you don’t know, whose time you have no way of knowing – through language, is really for me the essence of what this is all about. Because if we can do this, we can connect with each other across language, culture, religious difference, geographical difference. That is really, for me, the power of this language. I find it extraordinary.”

By

August 13th, 2015

10:03 am

Category: Authors

Tagged with: Enheduanna, feminism, Kim Echlin, poetry