can anyone on this gay ass website give me an opinion on which translation of the epic of gilgamesh i should read? ive been wanting to read it for ages but theres a number of common translations and i know translations can make or break a story; i dont want to start with the wrong one
I've read a few so I can offer recommendations! I started with the Sandars translation, which is a good starting point but a pretty early translation. Benjamin Foster's translation is one of my favourites, and the version I read (Second Norton Critical Edition) includes some really interesting discussion essays with it. Andrew George's translation received an update a couple of years ago so is up to date with Foster's translation, though I prefer how the language flows in Foster's.
I would also recommend Gilgamesh Retold by Jenny Lewis for a translation with a more modern poetic take.
Benjamin Foster’s Gilgamesh condenses all the different tablets we’ve found together to make one cohesive narrative which is way less intimidating and therefore my go-to if you want something that feels cohesive while also sticking very close to the language of the original. 10/10
Andrew George is the most thorough and up-to-date, and sticks as close to the text as you can get. It does, however, separate out all the different tablets, and feels very unedited in its style. Definitely not a “pretty” version. 10/10 cuz he’s a legend and this is the most definitive scholarly edition but don’t start with it.
Maureen Kovacs has a lovely translation with some very interesting footnotes on word choices. Her Ninsun is absolutely incredible and if you want to cry your eyes out over Gilgamesh’s fate that’s the one for you. It’s one step up from Foster’s in terms of poetic-ness but still pretty close to the original. 8/10
Sophus Helle is more poetic than Kovacs but BRILLIANT, one of my favourite Enkidus and his Shamhat is wonderful. Top favourite of all time. This is a very good starting point. 9/10
I wouldn’t recommend Sandars simply because it’s prose, and also condenses the twelfth tablet into a nice tidy ending that doesn’t really work with the Standard Babylonian narrative. 6/10
Lewis’ Gilgamesh Retold is more of a poetic retelling than a translation; it’s beautiful but definitely not a starting point. Sweet and gentle Enkidu though, very charming. 7/10
Stephen Mitchell I’m not a fan of. He smooths the poem out into something tame and very expected. This is my personal bias but I really dislike his Shamhat. His Enkidu and Gilgamesh are also explicitly more like brothers, which is a valid interpretation but also again not one I lean towards. 5/10
Herbert Mason’s Gilgamesh has some stunning moments in it (Enkidu! They do not know you like I know you!) However it is nowhere near the real text BUT closer than Lewis’. Changes the ending of the poem so it’s about Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu rather than mourning his own mortality; a much sadder conclusion with less resolution than in the Standard Babylonian. 7/10
BONUS ROUND:
Derek Hines’ play GILGAMESH is fucking DERANGED guys. Ten Gilgillion out of ten.
after a couple hours chopping dried sea urchins into tiny pieces with a razor blade you start referring to the razor blade as yourself in your thoughts. a little while afterwards you'll inevitably think something along the lines of "i'm getting a bit dull, i'm going to have to throw myself out & get myself a new self" at which point your internal monologue has pretty much returned to baseline
This happens with mobility aids too. I bump into shit with my forearm crutches and say "ow" before I realize those are not, in fact, More Legs. Then when I get up and try to walk without them for a second there's a moment of feeling like a dog walking upright
"humans are space orcs" this and "humans are the jack-of-all-trades race" that and "humans are the ones with a reputation for trying to fuck everything" and etc but you know what I don't see too often?
humans are the moms
compared to other species on earth, humans have a really outsized "protect baby" instinct. you give a human a thing and tell them it's actually a baby thing and many humans will suddenly develop a complete and total aversion to harming it, even if it's like, a writhing mass of slimy tentacles in no way reminiscent of human infants
cats domesticated us by figuring out that they could leave their kittens with us when they went out hunting and come back and probably still have the same number as before they left. there is a decent chance that wolves did the same thing
word gets around the less parenting-inclined species and they're just like, are you doing a long haul space voyage? going to have to lay some eggs in the course of the trip? take a few humans with you. yeah they'll just start training the young and keeping from them climbing into the machinery themselves you don't even have to find specialists. I know a guy who budded unexpectedly on a freight hauler halfway through a four year trip, and not only did the humans not eat his spawn, they set up this thing called "babysitting" where they'd take turns monitoring its survival and helping to teach it basic skills
hazard is that if you're going anywhere with xenofauna, you have higher than normal odds of the humans trying to smuggle some weird creature aboard ship, though. you gotta watch 'em. on their own homeworld their officials have to put up goddamn signs telling them not to feed dangerous wildlife or try to touch the babies. most of 'em do understand the regulations and about potential bio hazards but there always seems to be at least one that loses their goddamn minds because some avian chick got caught in a mudslide or something
"You've got to be exaggerating. Why would they be like that?"
"Easy. You know how most civilized species lay eggs, and even the ones that don't will have young ones able to move around and fend for themselves within the day?"
"Yeah, obviously."
"Human newborns can't even lift their own heads. They require the full-time attention of as many adults as possible to make sure they survive to a self-sufficient age, much less adulthood."
"Whaaaaat. How long does that take?"
"Many years. And their planet has long years."
"What!"
"Yes. So their parenting instincts are overclocked for a reason. And sometimes that spills over onto other species. ...And by 'sometimes,' I mean all the dang time."
"Uh huh."
"So keep them away from the dangerous fauna, especially the little ones, and be prepared for them to get emotionally attached to the occasional inanimate object. Oh! And if you need to get their attention in a loud room, play a recording of one of their young making a distress sound. They hate that, and will want it to stop immediately."
what is it about things being gender neutral having to also be ‘masculine’. like, why can you wear a suit and tie and call it gender neutral but not a dress cause that’s feminine. why can you call people dude or guy as a gender neutral term but not girl cause that’s feminine. short hair is neutral but long hair is feminine. i mean i know why this is fully a rhetorical question but let’s think about that
me (reminiscing on doing aikido & mma with my sister): i'm not sure if i was ever a good floor fighter. i think it was just bad for my opponents that i was so hypermobile i could get out of locks no person should be able to get outta.
saga: that's true. and we didn't even know why. we just called you 'the wiggler.'
since this conversation last night i've been stuck in a character voice for a gruff middle aged man called The Wiggler. i can't stop sending people voice memos as him....
helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!
Reading the article I see why TERFs are mad about it; it explicitly makes the distinction between gender as a social entity and sex as a biological category, and defines biological sex having multiple factors, both of which are anathema to TERF philosophy.
It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:
Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries.
Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males.
Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.
The article also talks about sexual dimorphism in different species, concluding that "Modern humans have low sexual dimorphism compared with the other great apes," and that overemphasis on averages obscures the wide dispersal of individual traits, which is what I keep saying.
making every conversation into being about The Character with the same reliability and conviction of a youth pastor going “you know who else partied? our lord and savior”
I've been meaning to make a post talking about my stroke because y'all got bits and pieces of the recovery but I never actually told the story of HOW it went down and the thing is the type of stroke I had is usually the type young people have and since having mine i've now heard multiple stories of people under 40 having very similar strokes and the scary thing is, is that they didn't get help right away. Because you're young and healthy and sure you feel weird but it'll pass right? but it doesn't, and it gets worse, and by the time you get to the hospital (some people literally take days to go) the deficits are worse and recovery is harder.
so here's a super long post about strokes in general, and mine in particular/what I went through.
So for strokes the signs are abbreviated BE FAST. Balance loss, Eyesight changes, Face drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty, -> Time to call 911.
Had I known those MAYBE I would have figured it out but my symptoms were a little mixed. I was reading (fanfic!) in bed because it was a sunday morning and i had nothing pressing to do and suddenly got dizzy. I put my laptop aside because my eyes were blurring (Eyesight changes - symptom #1), and laid down, thinking it would pass, it didn't, it's a little vague how it progressed because I'd been having headaches and neckpain for about 3 weeks leading up to it so I was like 'idk is this a migraine?' (headaches can be a stroke symptom so symptom #2) but i got nauseous and eventually got up and to my utmost surprise I immediately fell over as if I was the drunkest of frat bros. The room literally spun before my eyes as I fell to the floor (Balance loss - symptom #3). I have had some Nights and I had never been that unsteady before. I crawled my way to the bathroom, threw up (nausea - not a common stroke symptom) , took 800mg of ibuprofen, and crawled back to bed.
if you know anything about ibuprofen you might know it's a mild blood thinner and that's a high dose. I may have inadvertently helped myself with that one. I was just feeling like shit and thinking 'idk this might help'
At this point I still thought we were still in Normal Land. Sure, it was a weird morning, but Surely There Was A Reason. (Yes There Was) Anyway, as I'm lying there willing my body to stop suffering I realize my arm is going numb (stroke symptom #4) and I switch positions, because weird, but it doesn't go away, and I gave it a good little while. I'm on a medication that can make my limbs tingle but it usually just does it to my fingers and it dissipates quickly but this wasn't dissipating, and then I realized one of my legs was also going numb. Then one side of my face is going numb.
(at the time I did not look in the mirror but I had a drooping eyelid - symptom #5)
Those all seem bad. I grab my computer and google 'when to go to the hospital for dizzyness' as that felt like the worst of my problems. and indeed the list I found highlighted that if you are also experiencing loss of balance, blurred vision, nausea, and limb numbness, you should see a doctor. That seems like far too many symptoms to be having all to be listed. I grab my phone (thankfully plugged in and by my bed), and start layering on more clothing because it's about 10 degrees out and i'm in a pajama dress. The very nice man at 911 talks with me and sends an ambulance, I tell him I don't think I can get out the front door of my building on my own and he asks if I can get to MY apartment door to which I say yes and he assures me that's fine they will have keys to my building.
(I have been since informed they love to chop down doors but no, I could get that far)
I wait by my door laying down on the ground and they arrive pretty quickly. They see to me in the hallway, which is more of a lobby in my building and the only place with room for me to lie down (I cannot stand unassisted at this point) they ask me a bunch of questions, take vitals, and ask me where I would like to be taken. Me, having never had to go to the fucking hospital in an emergency before, simply go 'wherever is close' because I again, I am having a stroke and do not have the wherewithal to think through these things.
A big firefighter helps me down the stairs (it's only a half flight and I still almost did not make it) and we get underway.
At the hospital they wheel me into triage and I mostly lie there gratefully and answer some questions and respond to some tests (grip strength, following a pen with my eyes, that sort of thing) and then I hear what is great when you've been at urgent care for two hours but what is Very Bad when you just arrived in an ambulance and that's 'She's next'. I jumped the line for a CT scan and an MRI. I was there less than ten minutes before I was actively being scanned. honestly closer to five.
my active symptoms seem to have been worse than some of the stories I've heard, not being able to walk AT ALL in particular, although some other are pretty equal (Footless Jo on youtube had a stroke around the same time I did of the same type and has discussed hers, she delayed going in despite the severity for a variety of reasons and it sounds like her recovery has been difficult) My recovery was pretty easy because i was actively being cared for and on blood thinners right away. I was pretty out of it in the beginning, but I was only in the hospital for 6 days and then in a rehab for another 4 to relearn how to walk and balance, then i was released unto the world and just spent time going to physical therapy and recovering for awhile. I was out of work for about 8 weeks total. I basically had the best outcome for a stroke. I recovered almost fully back to 100% (I'm about 2% less sure footed than I used to be, but it's rarely noticeable), my face still feels a little weird but has markedly improved so I live in hope it will eventually get back to normal. It massively sucked. But strokes can fuck you up for life and I came out a weird medical story to tell and have to take some extra medication now/precautions to take (i cannot do certain types of yoga, no weightlifting, no push ups, no going on rollercoasters.... things that could strain my neck essentially) but overall I escaped very lucky.
For anyone who has ever had covid before, please be sure you are aware of stroke symptoms. Each successive infection raises the risk in a pretty major way, and a lot of people are dying young due to not knowing these signs or being afraid to act on them. Please take care of yourselves.
One interesting element of being a part of a conversation consisting of multiple ADHD people is the backtracking. At some point you realise you're all talking about granny oil wrestling or trying to remember what lobster blood is made of, and you all just go "wait, how the fuck did we get here?" and then you all start retracing your steps to figure out what you had been talking about before, and how it led to this one, until you get back to how you jumped from normal conversations to how one would logistically arrange an ostrich brothel.
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