An Interview with David Ferry
conducted by Erin McDonagh | published May 15, 2009

Call him the real hero of Gilgamesh.

Prizewinning poet and translator David Ferry is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College, a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University, and a frequent guest at the Core Poetry Seminar. His books of poetry and translation include The Epistles of Horace: A Translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press, 1999), The Eclogues of Virgil (1999), and The Odes of Horace: A Translation (1998). Of No Country I Know won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Ferry's other awards include the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ferry met with Erin McDonagh in April 2009 to discuss his Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (1993).

Erin McDonagh: I'd like to talk about Gilgamesh today. We use it in our Core classes, and it's the very first thing that we read. You say it's not a translation, but a transformation—
David Ferry: —a rendering, as I call it.

EM: Yes, a rendering. I assume you don't know ancient Babylonian.
DF: I do not.

EM: So I was wondering what text you worked from.
DF: Well, I worked from various word-for-word scholarly translations in English. I began to do it because William Moran, who is now, alas, deceased, was an Assyriologist at Harvard and was a friend of mine and liked my poetry and other translations that I've done. So he started me out on rendering, making a verse form, of two word-for-word passages he had translated. I did those under his supervision, and I got hooked and wanted to make a version of the poem that would be as faithful as possible to the Babylonian. Bill Moran then led me to other scholarly translations, which are acknowledged in my book. There are several wonderful translations which I consulted, principally the Speiser translation in the great anthology, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament.

I started out trying to do it in chunks of blank verse, but I was having a hard time in those first passages. It was slow going, but when I started to do it in iambic pentameter couplets, I found I was able to kind of oxygenate the lines and to see into them so as to see what I was doing. I think it is also true for a reader, that it is a clearer way to get to experience the movement of the verse and to see the detail of it.

EM: I assume that original verse, the original Babylonian isn't in couplets. How are they similar?
DF: I have heard transliterations of the Babylonian. That is, reconstructions by scholars, how they believe that the lines would be heard. And it's marvelous to listen to. It's unbelievably alliterated, to a point that would be intolerable, I think, in English and very difficult to try to imitate. So I didn't try to imitate that, or the motion of the verse. So far as I can tell, Babylonian verse-line and poem is something like Anglo-Saxon, that is, it's a free verse largely with two main stresses in the first half of the line and two in the second, but there can be any number of syllables between those two main stresses.

EM: Have you looked at what the writing looks like?
DF: Well the writing is cuneiform, and written in clay on tablets, and it's beautiful to look at.

EM: Did that help you with your work, constructing your own verse?
DF: Well, I just loved stupidly looking at it, admiring the look of it, without of course understanding any of it directly. What I tried to stay faithful to in the original, as experienced through the scholarly word-for-word translations, was the sense, first of all, second of all, the figures of speech, third of all, tonalities of the poem, the manner of telling, as best I could hear it registered in the scholarly, word-for-word translations that I read and that I could talk about with Bill Moran in conversation and have his help in reading the poem. There are holes in the time-damaged tablets that the scholarly translations all recognize. Those word-for-word translations stop where there's a hole; my task was to make a continuous poem, following the scholars' conjectures about how those holes would have been filled.

EM: What are your thoughts about the story's themes of friendship and mortality?
DF: First of all, it's the best story I've ever read. It's unbearably great, on so many levels. It's not the first epic because Etruscan literature has some of the same themes—it has Gilgamesh. The Babylonians took over that region, historically, and they learned the writing—it was the Sumerians who invented the writing. The Babylonians' language is utterly different. The Babylonians adapted the writing instrument form of Sumerian, cuneiform, for their own language, and made it their own.

EM: So they borrowed the story? Where does it originate then, in Sumer?
DF: Well, pieces of the story. The Sumerian Gilgamesh is in many ways a different figure. But I can't say much about that here; I'm not really a scholar of this history. The great tragic story of Gilgamesh is of a hero-king who is so proud of himself in such a role that he has to be taught by life—especially by the death of his companion, the wild man Enkidu—that he is mortal. And he heroically goes in search of immortality. You know the story; you've read the poem. And he's both comically and tragically defeated in that mission. But the vulnerability of heroes in a sense that we hear over and over in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and in what I'm translating now, the Aeneid. So it's a precursor of that material. That's true in some degree of the Sumerian poems that use Gilgamesh. So that's one thing about it. The other thing is that it's so full of exciting, terrifying, comic entertaining passages. Like the passage when Ishtar hits on Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh tells her what happened to all her other lovers.

EM: 'I don't want to die!'
DF: [Laughs] Yes. I read my grandsons—ages 8 and 5—the cedar forest passage, with the battle with the demon. That's terrific. They got it too, you know.

EM: I know you've talked about the flawed hero theme continuing in some of your other work. Is there any other particular theme or even a scene in Gilgamesh that resonates with you, as a person or as a poet?
DF: Yes, they are and aren't different, I think. The reason that's hard to answer is that it's in the nature of that poem that the story of it, from beginning to end, is so continuous that it's really hard to isolate one particular scene. It begins and ends with almost the same passage.

EM: Yes, with the description of the city of Uruk.
DF: Yes, the poem is, among other things, telling you that this is an organized unit that knows what it's about. It's telling you something about its own organization that is its own, in which Gilgamesh comes back to his city and points out to the boatman or to the reader, with a kind of rueful pride, what he's actually measured and what he's built and so on. At least he's done that, even though he couldn't achieve immortality. Everything in the poem leads to that. The poem is so wonderfully organized in that form, in the form in which we know it. It's hard for me to isolate a particular scene. On the other hand, you know, when I read from this poem, I find myself often reading the passage in which Enkidu is dying, and he has a dream of the underworld and Gilgamesh says the dream is terrible and then sits by the body for nine days until he sees the worms come out of his nose. That's so powerful—powerfully about death. And everybody's poems are about death, you know, in one way or another; it is possible to isolate some scenes as especially so. Another way to look at it is that the poem is a celebration of Gilgamesh the builder. I heard at a conference lately, a great Gilgamesh scholar say that in some ways, some things in the poem are allegories about inventing a great culture. For example, when Gilgamesh takes off his clothes in the waters of death and uses his clothes as a sail to sail across them, that something is being said about the invention of sailing. I don't know if it's valid to read the poem in that way or not, but one thing about the great theme of the poem is having to keep this king in line. He is, after all, a tyrant, and he's so beautiful and sexy that everybody loves him; but also from the get-go of the poem, they ask the earth goddess to invent a figure to hold him in line, the Wild Man, to teach the king measure and limitation so that things can be built. So it's hard to say. The minute I say 'yeah, that's the theme of the poem,' I think of another way of saying it. Another way to say the theme of the poem is how we are in the control of the gods and the gods are unreadable. And you don't know whose side they're on at any given moment. And they're quarreling among themselves.

EM: They might all be on different sides!
DF: It's the same thing in the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid. And in life!

EM: A lot of the lines are very simple, though really powerful, as when Gilgamesh says, 'Enkidu has died. Must I die too? Must Gilgamesh come to this?' And I don't know, is that more like what the original sounds like, or is that your interpretation?
DF: It's certainly not what the original sounds like, but it certainly is what the original says, and my guesses, developed in my interpretation, are about what it sounds like, what the tones of voice are. My source for it is reading all the scholarly word-for-word translations. I didn't use any expressions that didn't have some warrant in the original, except in the passages where there was really a sense of damage to the tablets, and there I didn't use any language that I wasn't encouraged to do so by conjecture by the scholars.

EM: Ok. I don't know anything about Babylonian verse, but do you think that that sort of powerful but simple language is more relevant to the story, that they would use that more for a story like Gilgamesh? Or is it very characteristic of most things that they would write?
DF: There are other poems that I've read translations of from Babylonian and Sumerian, where that remarkable directness is the case. I've also rendered, and somewhat adapted, a poem that scholars refer to as the Babylonian Job and so on, and the directness of the language of the poem at the moment is just startling. He's talking in a very paranoid way about how his friends are out to get him, He talks about going to the palace of the king (I guess he's a court-functionary of some sort), and says: "The king is angry and he will not hear me. / When I go to the palace now, they look at me. // One person blinks and another looks away. / What are these omens? How is it I should read them." This startling vivid simple directness in Gilgamesh—and in the Babylonian Job— is a characteristic of their sophisticated art where this directness is used. It isn't that they're a simple people. Their language and their art is complexly derived and its vivid direct language serves its purposes.

Of course it's true that the Gilgamesh is not the product of a single artist. The culture wrote it, across many centuries. The version of it that we have, told on eleven of the twelve tablets found in the palace of an Assyrian king, may have been shaped and organized in a definitive way by one mind. There's a name associated with it, Sin-leqe-unnini ("Moon god, help me out"), just a scribe, maybe, but maybe the great ultimate poet of the poem as we have it. Certainly the way it begins and ends with the same words seems to be telling us, proudly, that we are reading a unified work of art, highly conscious of itself as such.

EM: The flood story appears in a number of mythologies.
DF: Regarding the story of the flood, the Babylonian poem is much earlier than the Hebrew Bible story, and a better telling. But the Hebrew Bible story's lesson is clearer and more moral: the misbehavior of men causes the Hebrew God to bring the flood down upon them. The Gilgamesh poem, which shares some elements of it—for example, strikingly, at the end of the flood sending the birds out—is almost the same as the Hebrew poem and the Hebrew poem must be borrowed from that, if not from some literature that we don't have that's in between. But the lesson in the Babylonian poem is more about the inscrutability of the gods and it's not necessarily saying the flood was brought down upon them for some cultural sin or deficiency.

EM: I remember I read an interview you did, and you said when you do translations it sort of inspires you, helps you form poems that you wrote afterward. Did Gilgamesh help inform any poems you wrote?
DF: There is a case of a poem of mine called "That Evening at Dinner;" it's in my last book of selected poems, Of No Country I Know, and its last line reads: "[…] there were also / Ashes to be eaten and dirt to drink." That is a literal quotation from the dream of Enkidu when he's dying and telling what it's like in the underworld. Virgil's lines in his Georgics, which I've translated, about Orpheus and Eurydice have directly entered into several elegiac poems of mine. I don't know about "inspired." I think every writer experiences how what he has been reading enters, directly or indirectly, into what he's writing.

Read Prof. Ferry's poem "That Evening at Dinner" at Slate Magazine , or listen to a recording of him reading it. Prof. Ferry is a regular guest speaker at the Core Poetry Seminar. The poet Rachel Hadas writes about her experience of reading Ferry's poems at The New Criterion. Read Ferry's Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, at Google Books. View video of Ferry reading from his translations and discussing the art and practice of translation. This interview appeared originally in the The Journal of the Core Curriculum, an annual, student-produced anthology of exemplary writing by the students and faculty of the Boston University Core Curriculum.

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