Praise for Humming the Blues

“Concurrently the newest and the oldest ecstatic poetry in the history of the written word, this inspired book of verse adaptations by Cass Dalglish pulses with energy, throbs with archetypal imagery and contemporary rhythms, leaves me breathless. Ten years in the study of ancient Sumerian cuneiform from Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), Dalglish brings her exquisite sensibility to rendering these texts in English, giving us poems in the voice of high priest and poet Enheduanna, the first writer in recorded history to sign a name to her work. Here is a book like no other: an ancient story within a story: fresh and vivid and so utterly compelling, so convincing, one forgets—as the poet sings praises to the ancient deity Inanna, showing us their parallel lives—that Enheduanna is not one of our best, most mature, most exciting poets living today. Humming the Blues is nothing short of exhilarating. Trust me, it will sweep you away.” Ingrid Wendt, Oregon Book Award Recipient, Singing the Mozart Requiem

“Humming the Blues represents an astoundingly bold and daring poetic project—original, ambitious, effective, and hugely creative. Dalglish carries us in leaps across time, cultures, languages, and writing systems to open the cuneiform hymn of Sumerian Princess-Priestess Enheduanna to us, twenty-first century readers of English. She respectfully and lovingly recasts the ancient multivalent work into a feminist, feminine lyric modeled on jazz riffs. The. . .poems are a beautiful and lyrical theophany that render the god Inanna in a courageous portrayal that makes us glad to know the unfamiliar divinity, even in her terrible aspects. . . . [It] holds a love poem to a god no longer distant, no longer foreign, thanks to the power and magnificence of Dalglish’s own poetic voice. Still, as gorgeous and immediate as is this portrayal of Inanna, like any deity, she remains ultimately incomprehensible, a mystery presented to the reader as an elusive gift, and Dalglish is to be commended for not reducing a god into a pedestrian caricature. . . . In Dalglish’s exquisite poems Enheduanna sings to Inanna, and we in turn sing to Dalglish: ‘Your brilliant voice melts two suns and a full moon and drips them onto the earth like fine oil.’” Juanita Garciagodoy, Digging the Days of the Dead: A Reading of Mexico’s Dias De Muertos

“These are the Ur texts, literally: original writings committed to stone and clay thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia. We cannot help but think of Iraq, both the ancient world where Enheduanna made her poems and the world at war we know today. Now recast by Cass Dalglish, these translations recognize the simultaneity of possible meanings of words. Her own poetic intuition often pushes lines to move beyond words to that place where jazz scat gets its urgency. She vocalizes in sensual oohs, and ahhs, in great bellows, and in powerful lament that voices the ‘life-giving rage’ original to these poems. Enheduanna, ancient poet, stands as torch singer whose long drawn notes address God as Sister in detailed and intimate adoration. These are psalm-improvisations to Inanna, the ‘womanly god,’ the moon, the ‘wild impetuous’ and ‘mother of all ritual.’ These poems, lapis blue and saffron-perfumed, come through Cass Dalglish from ancient Enheduanna in the voice of a sister who carries ruined roses and woe across many centuries to stand against the ransacking of sacred places, to confront terror with a woman’s strongest weapon: the force of life.” Heid E. Erdrich, The Mother’s Tongue

“Cass Dalglish’s brilliant excavation and restoration of the life and work of an ancient woman, who was a great leader, resonates now. It is powerfully affirming. These captivating poems restore vivid life to an amazing sister, lost and now found, thousands of years after her death.” Carol Connolly, Poet Laureate, St. Paul, MN

“Humming the Blues gives us a feminist riff on an old story of destruction and rebirth . . . an amalgam of poetry and poetics, jazz, and the ancient Sumerian celebratory poem of Inanna’s return. From destruction through despair to resurrection, the poet gives birth to her song out of turmoil. Dalglish inspires us with her testimony to women’s strength, intelligence, and perseverance. One can’t help when reading this to think of present day Iraq and the current cast of characters from President Bush on down as stand-ins for Big-Man-in-the-Sky with their hungry grab for power. The poems are lush and thought-provoking. This is a book for any reader fascinated by language and poetry at the intersection of an ancient culture.” Cary Waterman, The Salamander Migration

“With great care and great abandon, Cass Dalglish brings us story-song-poems that hopscotch from our present moment all the way back to ancient Sumer and return to us as ‘fresh interpretations to familiar songs.’ As intricately woven as tapestries, as wildly inventive and associative as hypertext, these poems are a timeless and contemporary reminder that there is always a ‘big man in the sky’ and that in the end, all we have is the voice, ‘squealing like the bellows of a blacksmith keeping company with the dead.’” Rachel Zucker, The Bad Wife’s Handbook

“Dalglish, in a voice she builds from translating and contemplating cuneiform signs made by Enheduanna, brings to life Enheduanna’s power, her forced exile, and her belief in the god and judge Inanna, a god in heaven and on earth. . . . Dalglish creates meditations that travel between Enheduanna, the imagined and re-created Inanna, and herself, the contemporary poet and feminist. . . . And this is Dalglish’s accomplishment, allowing her readers spiritual access to an ancient voice, a female god, and spiritual connection, also, to the intuition and poetic visions of a modern writer who knows the wisdom of carrying us back to contemplate, suffer and learn from this history.” Deborah Keenan, Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems, Milkweed Editions

“This bold arrangement by Cass Dalglish of Nin-me-šar-ra makes the original composition by Enheduanna resonate anew across forty-three centuries.” Fran Hazelton, Stories from Ancient Iraq, The Enheduanna Society

Humming the Blues

By Cass Dalglish

Inspired by Nin-me-šar-ra, Enheduanna’s Song to Inanna

CALYX Books
Corvallis, Oregon

This open access edition is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright © 2008 Cass Dalglish

Cover: Tablet 1, Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šar-ra, 2350 BCE, courtesy of the Yale Babylonian Collection
Cover and book design by Cheryl McLean

The publication of the print book was supported with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the William A. Gillmore Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation.

For ordering information and additional titles please visit www.calyxpress.org.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dalglish, Cass
Humming the blues / by Cass Dalglish
“Inspired by Nin-me-šar-ra, Enheduanna’s song to Innana.”
1. Inanna (Sumerian deity)—Poetry.   I. Enheduanna. Nin-me-šar-ra.   II. Title.

PS3554.A4325H86     2008
811’.54—dc22

ISBN-13: 978-0-934971-99-7 (electronic)

For Louie

Contents

Image I

Characters

Introduction

Image II

The Poems

Notes on a Jazz Reading

Endnotes

About the Author

Characters Who Appear in Humming the Blues

Enheduanna . . . the narrator, a poet, priest, and prince of Ur and Uruk. She is a historical person, the first writer to sign her name to a text. The daughter of Sargon, she lived about 2350 BCE in Sumer, now Iraq. In the poem, she compares her exile from Ur and Uruk to Inanna’s journey to the Land of No Return.

Inanna . . . the Sumerian deity who reigned in heaven and on earth and is famous for her trip to hell and back again. She is the god who comes back to help Enheduanna return from exile. She is sometimes called the impetuous wild cow.

An, god of heaven . . . patron deity of the temple of Uruk, he is unable or unwilling to help Enheduanna when the “big man in the sky” ransacks and usurps the temple at Uruk.

Ashimbabbar, god of the moon . . . Enheduanna’s patron deity of the temple of Ur, also known as Nanna. He doesn’t seem to be able to help Enheduanna in her struggle against the big man in the sky.

Ishkur, storm god . . . god of thunder and lightning. When Inanna streaks across the sky with her fiery hair, she is compared to Ishkur, who spits firestorms and floods the valleys.

Ushumgalana, dragon of heaven . . . the great snake of heaven. Inanna is compared to Ushumgalana, pounding like a dragon across the mountains. This is also a name given to Inanna’s husband Dumuzi.

Big man in the sky . . . the usurper and oppressor who ransacks the temple, ravishes Enheduanna, and drives her out of power. This is probably Lugalanne, a king known as the usurper, who took over Uruk.

Introduction

Years ago, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I woke up one night to a moaning, howling sound that seemed to move back and forth behind my house on the eroding edges of the Colombian hills. The moaning lasted most of the night, and in the morning I opened the front door and breathed in the strong smell of death. I was expecting to see our neighborhood birds, the vultures, sunning themselves in the trees when a neighbor came by and asked if I’d heard La Llorona the night before. “She wanders the hills,” my neighbor said, “looking for her dead children.” La Llorona is a spirit; she is the subject of stories and songs, and I had just heard her voice and smelled her deathly robes! I’ve never been able to forget my physical perception of this ancient story. In fact, it has driven me as a writer to seek the company of other women spirits—such as Enheduanna, the woman poet who lived 4,000 years ago in Sumer, the birth place of writing and history, the land we now call Iraq, and Inanna, the wild woman god who wanders through ancient myth on her way to hell and back again.[1]

I found Inanna’s story when I was on a journey as a spiritual feminist, seeking wisdom and the female divine. The more I learned, the more I hungered for stories of Inanna, Ishtar, Sophia, Hathor, and Rhea, tales told around campfires late at night, embellished here and there, details added and subtracted by ancient minstrels who knew how to make the stories their own. I was curious about the point at which a storyteller decides to commit a tale to writing, on clay or stone or papyrus, and soon I found myself on another quest, a search for the people who had committed their stories to writing. I enrolled in obscure-language courses at the University of Minnesota and began to study the first written languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, memorizing pictographs, attempting to comprehend the most demanding grammatical rules I had ever encountered, and translating historical and economic texts. Through it all I was acting on faith. I was convinced that I would eventually find texts that had been composed by women; I was following a hunch that back in the old days when god was a woman, there must have been women who were writers and editors as well.[2] And, of course, there were.

One of them was a woman named Enheduanna, a poet, prince, and priest who used the legend of Inanna as the central metaphor in a long personal poem—Nin-me-šar-ra—a poem written somewhere around 2350 BCE, in honor of the resurrected god. I refer to Inanna as a god here because the Sumerian language didn’t separate deities by gender—there were no goddettes or goddesses, just gods, some female, some male. And the same is true of the titles I use to describe Enheduanna; there’s no need to call her a priestess, princess, or poetess, since those titles were not gendered either. Enheduanna is not just any writer; she is the first person in history to sign her name to a written work, the first identifiable poet. When Enheduanna pressed reeds into soft clay to write her poem to Inanna, she included a line that makes it clear that she is the author of the work. No writer, man or woman, had ever done that before. She was the high priest and ruler in Ur and Uruk, ancient cities located in an area that would be southeast of Baghdad in modern-day Iraq. Although I have referred to her as a spirit because she lived over 4,000 years ago, Enheduanna was a real person, one we know actually existed because of evidence in historical records, literary documents, and archeological discs that include her image. Scholar William Hallo believes Enheduanna’s story can be connected to a specific moment in history. She was the daughter of Sargon. She served as prince and high priest in the temples at both Ur and neighboring Uruk, and she was instrumental in helping her father hold the two city-states together. At Ur, Enheduanna served the moon god Nanna (also called Ashimbabbar); at Uruk, she served An, the god of heaven.[3]

At a high point in her career, Enheduanna was exiled from her temples. Her people were forced out of their homes. The sacred cloisters where Enheduanna had performed her priestly rituals were ransacked, and she was stripped of her powers, beaten, raped, and left to wander in the hills. In her poem, Enheduanna tells of being forced out of both Ur and Uruk. Hallo believes that the scenes of urban turmoil in Enheduanna’s poem describe the sacking of Uruk by Lugalanne, a usurper who upset the Sargonic regime and took over Uruk.[4] I call Lugalanne “big man in the sky” in my interpretation of Enheduanna’s poem, having taken Lugalanne’s name apart, identifying him sign-by-sign (lu-gal-an-ne or man-big-sky-in) not as a singular king of Uruk but as an “everyman-usurper-oppressor.” When Enheduanna and her temple are taken over by the big man, she tries to get help from Ashimbabbar, the moon god, and from An, the god of heavenly skies, but they both refuse to help her. That is when she calls out to Inanna, comparing Inanna’s epic journey to the Land of No Return to her own banishment from power.

Enheduanna sets the scene by reminding us who Innana is—wild, beautiful, powerful, and spontaneous—a deity who is famous in the heavens as well as on earth. The poet imagines Inanna flying through the universe like a storm, like Ishkur, the god of storms, and tramping over the hills like a dragon, like Ushumgalana, the dragon of heaven, then abandoning everything to satisfy her curiosity about the Netherworld and taking a forbidden journey to the Land of No Return.[5]

When Enheduanna switches to her own story, she mingles her life with Inanna’s, and we can’t miss the parallels between the great myth of Innana and Enheduanna’s personal mythology. Both are stripped of their powers, both are left spoiled and lifeless in the hands of antagonists, and in both cases, the people who depend on them are stripped of everything, even their ability to desire. In Inanna’s story, her sister the underworld deity is moaning and groaning in labor. In Enheduanna’s story, it is the poet who moans and groans and finally gives birth to her song. Enheduanna’s birthing scene is one of the first in which a writer uses the obviously female metaphor to describe her creative process; she seems to be telling us that an artist will be stripped of everything except the creation that is born onto the empty page. The theory amazes and frightens me as a writer, but it doesn’t cause me despair because it seems to be saying that if you relive the story of Inanna, whatever anguish or pleasure you stray into, you always have a chance of returning. To understand that challenge, it would be good to remember Inanna’s story. Here is my retelling of Inanna’s story, altered and embellished as folk stories often are. It goes like this:

Inanna was a brilliant and beautiful god, famous in love and furious in battle, supreme both in heaven and on earth. She was also a judge who knew all the rules and broke them whenever she wanted to. One day Inanna wanted to break the rule that said no one, not even a god like her, could go to the Otherworld and come back out alive. The rule was so well accepted the Sumerians called the Otherworld the “Land of No Return.” Inanna’s sister Ereshkigal was in charge there, and she wasn’t about to share her hellish domain with a sister who already had control of heaven and earth. But Inanna decided to go to the Otherworld anyway, and she prepared for the trip by dressing up in her crown, her flowing red robe, her necklace of lapis, and her carnelian vest. She carried the ropes of royalty in her left hand and tied the secret rules of the universe to her right wrist. Carefully, she lined her eyes with soft black coal and painted her lids and her lips with the tints she stored in shells from the sea, and then she called her administrative assistant Ninshubur and told her, “If I’m not back in three days and three nights, wrap yourself in rags, go to the gates of the Otherworld and weep for me, scratch at your face and claw at your thighs and beg the other gods for help.”

Inanna then began her walk into the depths of the mountain, through the seven gates of hell. Of course, she wasn’t expected in the Land of No Return; no one is expected. And at each of the gates, Ereshkigal instructed the gatekeeper to strip Inanna of one of her garments. First she lost her crown, then her jewels, then her vest, then her great robe. And as she went up and down into the Netherworld, the gatekeeper wiped the glamour from Inanna’s face, demanded the royal ropes, and snatched the rules of the universe from her hands. Inanna did not protest because she was going through the gates of hell of her own free will. Finally, naked and powerless, she entered the room where her sister was moaning in pain. Within seconds, Ereshkigal, still groaning in labor, killed her sister Inanna and hung her naked body on a wooden stake.

People say Ninshubur, the faithful administrative assistant, did exactly as she was instructed. She waited three days and three nights, and when she hadn’t heard from Inanna, she wrapped herself in rags, went to the gates of the Otherworld, and wept for Inanna, scratching at her face and clawing at her thighs. Then she set out to beg the other gods for help in getting Inanna back from the Land of No Return.

But the Sumerian gods knew they were not above the law, and none of them was willing to try to bring Inanna back; after all, she’d always been willful, and this time she’d simply gone too far. But just when Ninshubur thought no one would help her, she came to the temple of the god Enki, Inanna’s uncle, god of wisdom and waters and, coincidentally, the god whom Inanna had tricked out of the secrets of the universe one night by getting him a little drunk on Sumerian beer.

“We mustn’t let the beautiful Inanna perish in the Land of No Return,” Enki said, and he created small beings from the dirt under his fingernails. The little creatures were neither male nor female, and they could move through the gates of hell like flies. Enki gave the food of life and the water of life to the creatures. “When you hear a woman’s voice moaning as though she is laboring and giving birth, moan in sympathy,” he told them as he sent them into the Otherworld. “When you hear someone weeping, weep in sympathy.” Enki had a theory that Inanna’s sister would soften when the creatures showed her compassion. “She’ll offer you a gift,” he said, “and when she does, ask for the corpse hanging on the wooden stake. Sprinkle Inanna with the water of life, nourish her with the food of life, and she’ll come back from the dead. When she rises, you must walk her back through the gates of hell.”

And so, the story goes, the creatures lead Inanna back to life, with the underworld marshals in hot pursuit, demanding that Inanna comply with the rules—that she come back or that she offer a substitute, someone who would take her place in hell. The demon marshals see Ninshubur bent in mourning at the edge of the path from hell, and they try to replace Inanna with her. But Inanna refuses the deal. “Look at her, she’s dressed in rags, she’s clawing at her body, she’s weeping. You can’t take her,” Inanna says.

Later, they try to take Inanna’s daughter and her son, but Inanna lodges the same protest each time. They are both in mourning for her, wearing rags, scratching at themselves, and weeping, so they are spared too.

In the end, when the procession—composed of the genderless creatures sent by Enki, the mourners, the resurrected Inanna, and the dreaded underworld demons—reaches the last of the gates, there is music and laughter coming from the garden just outside. It is Dumuzi, Inanna’s husband, sitting on his throne in elegant garments, playing his flute, eating fruit, and sipping cool milk.

Inanna opens the last gate and sees that Dumuzi is having a party, that he hasn’t even noticed she was gone.

The underworld spirits look at Dumuzi and say, “We’ll take him.”

“Be my guest,” Inanna tells the demons, and the underworld spirits fly after Dumuzi. They beat him and try to drag him into hell, but he gets away, and the demons chase him clear across the earth before it is all over. But that’s another story.[6]

Of course Inanna returns at the end of Enheduanna’s poem, just as she does at the end of her own story, saving Enheduanna and her people and proving that Inanna is as strong, if not stronger, than any big man in the sky, and certainly as powerful as both the god of the moon and the god of heaven.

Enheduanna did not write in words. She wrote in cuneiform pictographs that I have studied in formal classes, mentored readings, and solitary contemplation. Sumerian signs could signify more than one idea; they could express notions of person, place, or thing and could also express action and desire. In interpreting Enheduanna’s work, I have tried to remain open to this ambivalence. In discussing this text, I have at times compared it to choral music and to hypertext poetry. I have suggested that the action stored in the cuneiform sign gives it the potential of a one-take movie. Although some may think of the forty-nine meditations that follow here as translations and others might think of them as folk songs heard around campfires, I prefer to think of them as riffs—improvised strains of the sort created by jazz musicians giving fresh interpretations to familiar songs. From time to time, I have included in the meditations on Enheduanna’s signs phrases based on transcriptions of the Sumerian text. These lines are meant to be read as spontaneous sounds that carry us back into the ancient text, holding their own meanings without translation, a sort of Sumerian scat.

In “Notes on a Jazz Reading,” an essay at the end of this work, I will explain more fully how I have approached the language issues and why I feel that a jazz reading gives the truest reading of Enheduanna’s cuneiform signs. I will also explain the methods I used to meditate on the multiple meanings, creating the jazz riffs that produce in the end a persona poem, one in which I take on the voice of Enheduanna, humming the blues.

Cass Dalglish

Sister

sometimes I think I ought to call you the Queen of the May—the way you toss

light, like yellow dandelions out of a basket, here and there; or maybe I should call

you god, the way you’ve wrapped the laws of heaven and earth around your waist

like a belt, the way you skim over chaos like a quicksilver river. But I call you

Sister because you’re like the rest of us, opening like a pale morning, swelling

like a storm, clutching the torch of longing to your breast until you feel life

at your throat, until you’re all dressed up in flames. Sweet Sister, you know it

all. A woman’s desire is deep, and you’re the measure of it.

You’re not a trophy

not some kind of ornament, a decoration for the sky—you’re the priest, you’re

the healer, you’re the wild god who turns her ear toward heaven, who digs her feet

into the earth, who whispers in the wind. Inanna, when I look at you

I see a prophet with love and truth blazing from her crown, I see a figure glowing

in the light—pure and simple and dangerous. I see now, Inanna,

you’re on fire.

And when you squat with your weaving

twisting and untwisting the threads of life, you harvest spirit, you reap breath,

you cradle souls at your breast, you let the flaws unravel. Your hands speak

in metaphor; they reach, they tell stories, they reach again, they want it all,

and there you are, counting, counting to seven, counting all there is—hours, days,

every moment squeezed in your fist, chained to your wrist bones, the universe tied

by silky cords to your mask.

And when you climb back into the mountains

when your feet pound the hills like thunder, you walk with the feet of a dragon—

ishkur-gim, ushumgal-gim. Your drumming saps the rose of its scent and barley

shivers at your sound—ishkur-gim, ushumgal-gim. The land withers under your

step but your drumming hides all the secrets—ishkur-gim, ushumgal-gim. You’re

riding the rapture, Inanna, mounting the fire—ishkur-gim, ushumgal-gim. On earth

and in heaven, you’re a hero. Inanna, you move with the power of the gods.

You’re the wild one, Inanna, the strong one. Is this how you give us life?

Nobody, not the gods in heaven

absolutely no one would try to hide you behind the windows of the night because

your howl is the law—ahh, ooh, ahh. Your sweat is the oil of gods. You swoop

down, riding wild dogs, riding the head wild dog. You drench yourself in the resin

of being, you feed on rituals, you breathe out your swampy red heat until

the night sky weeps your flames, spits your fire, and confesses you’re there.

And then. . . you and your pack come rushing down the mountain like troops. You

pound down the hill like a deluge—ishkur-gim, ushumgal-gim,

ishkur-gim, ushumgal-gim. You flood the valley with your storm—ishkur-gim,

ushumgal-gim, ishkur-gim, ushumgal-gim.

Wait a minute, break the code

let’s have plain talk. The people sway like trees in a torrent, drowning in the great

noise at the edge of your bending stream. Your rivers hold watery wisdom, but

tell us how to control your floods. Sister, you’ve got the secret words, so sing them

for us. Who’s wise? Who can say the forbidden? Who can open the secrets of an

hour? Who’s tasted the end and the endless? You’re the word, secret word. Sing

the word.

Now you ride

over the land like a wild, impetuous creature until the light at the center of the

storm gives you wings. And then you fly to the left, and then you fly to the right of

longing. You fan desire until the god of winds blows you a braid of roses for the

grassy cloisters of the night. I see you now, flying, small and shining, over the

moon, wings flapping, drums beating, wind to this side, wind to that side. Your

boat of heaven moves across the sky over and over again. Thirty times. You’re

the law. But the flight is ending now. Sister, it’s time to measure your path to the

deep. The earth bows and curves its grasses so that you can enter, so that you can

take the other way around. You whisper your name, write it in the ashes. You do

not sleep.

A night bird flies

here and there, and I listen to your spells as they blow out of the terrible silence

over sacred harps, as chance shimmers in the moist warm wind, as possibility stirs

human souls and thickens them in the cream of your radiance. Harmony spirals in

the air and you wrap its pure spirit in light, fold its treasure in your heat, dress it

in your red gown.

You’re the great woman stretching red cloth

like a funeral bier, and I grasp it in my hand. When you begin the lament, I pluck

my harp and soak myself in tears, even though the watery way around will be

my downfall and I will have my share of the white plaster of death. This path

breaks away from time and leads to the hour of loss in the house of heroes, the

house of mourning, the house of abundant misery where water pours from

a broken cup and a draft blows rose petals through windows covered

with barbed wire.

You’ve got an eye for trouble

Inanna, you’ve braided danger into your hair and you make it look

glamorous—right up to the moment when you open the floodgates of hell,

right up to the moment when you steep yourself in death. And then, my Sister,

you fly around in all four directions, like a bird flapping its wings in a violent

wind—north, south, east, west. Will you swoop down to peck away at the treasure

in my bones or will you pause to sing your lament? Listen, your perfect song

whips up the storm, u-du-du-da, i-du-du-de. Your horns tumble stars from the sky:

u-du-du-gim, i-du-du-de-en. Your brilliant voice melts two suns and a full moon

and drips them onto the earth like fine oil, u-du-du-gim, i-du-du-de-en, u-du-du-da,

i-du-du-de.

You play the evening rain like a sacred harp

plucking sighs, striking close, weeping for the heroes. It’s you in the roar

of the storm, your thunder echoing from every corner, you flooding over

the people, soaking them in the earth. You open a pocket for air, then you fill

the people’s gasps with rain. And this storm is no quick bath; the land will be

mud; the soil will be worm eaten. And then you’ll lift your restless feet and slip

back into the sky with the troubled breezes. You’ll share their impatience; you’ll

fly here and there with the furious and splendid winds until your storm has

conquered everything, until—like a singer humming the blues—you moan twice,

quietly at first, as though your voice were shackled, then loud and brilliant,

tinged with the sound of horns, filled half with laughter, half with sorrow.

My Sister, my icy Sister, my stone-cold Sister

even the gods of terror, the gods who gag us with fear, take the long way around

you. They won’t come near the angry water of your eyes, your howling face

in a scarlet cloth. They hide from your enormity; they won’t approach your

blood-stained face, the wild tint of your angry head. They hear your perfect sound

and dart around like bats. They leave tracks as they flee to the cave. Skin

fluttering, they enter the sweet heat of the hill.

Now you wrap your heart in evening’s scarlet sashes

and offer yourself to your people who trudge on caterpillar feet beneath your frail

stillness. But who can store this moment of passing grace? Who can hold onto a

modest calm offered by a god who is so good at being reckless? Is there a stranger

from the other world, some artist who can fashion a talisman, some magician who

can offer you a soothing brew? Sister, you’re the one who comes from the place

of palm trees and sweet melons. You’re the one with the garden full of saffron

and fragrant oils. Sister, you’re the one who knows the mysteries birds whisper in

the grasses, the one who can quiet shattered souls. You’re a child of the heavens,

a daughter of the moon, and yet you wrap yourself up in scraps of passion and spin

angrily through the hills—and the breaks in your fury are brief and rare. Who can

imagine appeasing you?

Your voice is the voice of the mountain

the song of crevices in the hill, the prayer of water embracing the bank.

There’s no ignoring you, no running away from the soil that turns rose-colored

under your rain, no saying “No” to you. You’re supreme over this land

and the heavens. But the other world is separate and taboo and nobody

expected you at the gates of hell. They treated you like a foreigner, so you

broke down the doors, you splintered the enormous gates into dust that dripped

into the river with the rain and disappeared behind the shadow of shadows.

Inside, a blacksmith cast a scene that looked like the land of the dead.

Did you invite him to carry you through the gaps in the grass to his reservoir

of rusty water? Did you drink from that pool? Inanna, is our memory

of your journey a gift, or will it lead us on a path to a steamy grave

at the mouth of a river full of blood?

You scattered your story in the rushes

tossed power and beauty like cinders in the wind. And the others, the handmaids

of hell, they were fluttering around you, here and there, following you into the

void. You had yourself all tied up in a glamorous and brilliant idea, and as you

spoke, your voice sounded high and airy, like someone laughing far away. You

were drinking in the sweet thick taste of juniper, the honeyed nectar of death. And

I thought to myself, Inanna, if this is the end, who will dance with the god

of the moon? Strong women and bold men and heroes and radicals and loners

and painters and dancers and poets were drawn to you; they tied themselves

to echoes of your splendor, but the roses they carried were dropping their petals,

the songs they sang were swallowed up by the void because your heart’s treasure

was being looted in the abyss, and the end was the only sign anyone could see.

And while the gates of hell were open

while wind and water went unmeasured, storms and floods spilled out on the earth.

Reverence between a woman and a man was dampened by the rain and covered by

grass and mud. Outside, the wind was cold. Deep inside, the wind laughed and

moaned. Inanna, were you whispering to the people? Could your sighs protect

their souls from hell? In the city, dance clubs looked like funeral parlors.

Is someone still alive in there? The strong, the bold, and the young swarmed

out through windows and swam along to the music of their ancestors,

feeling the cords that always carried mother/father power, but this time they

spilled their hopeful energy as though they were pouring water from pottery jars,

and soon they were exhausted. Heavy air chased them; they hurried along

in search of a breathing space, and in the end they were scattered.

The story goes

that when you were in that mountain, when you were in that other world,

the rules of the universe were tossed into the weeds and your people were circling

around in the drizzle and the ashes, unable to pray. You swaggered into the abyss

drinking in the rain of all rains, drinking fire as though it were your own private

brew. And in your holy outrage you polished off your crystal cup of ruin and

turned around, listening for the sound of your name, expecting to hear songs about

the brilliance of your mother, the glory of your father, the splendor of the moon

that glowed in the sky as you were born.

But no one beat the drums

for you in that other world; no one knew your song there; no one spoke

of the abundance of your charm. Instead you heard the moan of all moans, the

sigh of all sighs. In that steamy place deep inside the earth, all sounds were bent

into echoes. A mumble here, a mutter there, again and again, every murmur

bounced back on itself until every call became its own soft answer; every song

became an antiphon. Ahh-Ahh . . . Ooh-Ooh . . . Ahh-Ahh . . . Ooh-Ooh.

They closed the gates

around you deep inside the earth; they tied your life to the wall and lay your

treasure out like rich red wool. And as your life ebbed, the leafy trees outside lost

their perfume, the fish in the river lost their scent. When the women leaned

out of their windows hoping for a sip of fresh air, loneliness was all that dripped

from the sky. And they lost their desire to taste sweet fruit, to drink cool milk, to

walk with their men in the fields of roses, to lie down with their men in the tall

grasses. And even in the pure black darkness of night, even in private rooms where

sweet perfumes insisted that life would go on, even there, flowers folded shut on

themselves as lovers forgot the riches they had locked inside their hearts. They

could not reveal their passions, whether sacred or profane. They could not

awaken one another. And instead of offering tenderness, they whispered,

“What’s it to me? What’s it to you? What do we care?”

My Sister, where are you?

I thought I saw you last night running like a wild woman with too many legs,

streaking across the air, striking at the sky, painting figures on the night

as though the heavens were walls in your cave—a lion, an ibex, an owl, seven

tiny deer, three bulls chasing a herd of yellow horses, and a young albino

buffalo running the other way. On midnight’s ceiling you used ochre to paint

the mothers of Rhea, Hathor, and all the sacred cows jumping over the moon.

While rain spilled their red milk onto the earth, winds carried our dismal chants,

lifting our howling voices and letting them drop, but nothing was enough.

Sister, where are you?

You had ten secrets

ten sacred mysteries, ten fountains of wisdom, and you changed them all

into shiny beads and strung them around your waist, letting our lives dangle

as you danced too close to the flame. Sister, Sister, you know everything, you

rule everywhere, you can still climb the banks of the river of fire, crawl

over mounds of ash and come back to us from the smoldering swamps

of that other world.

Your mother earth is moaning

covered in sweat, struggling to give life to you again. Her tears are the water

of life; her cries are the words of life. Sweet Sister, listen. It’s the hour of mystery.

It’s time. Push your way through to us again. You know everything, you see

everything. You’re the one who needs to breathe, but you’re waiting for us

to sing the perfect song, to share the prophet’s wisdom, to use the power

of speech. You’re dancing on the line between life and death, but Sister-Mother-

Father, this is not suicide, it’s re-birth. Let your breasts lift and fall. Life

is braided into your hair, let it hang heavy on your shoulders like music falling

from the strings of a harp. It’s time for you to leave the other world. This is

the hour of your brilliance, Sister. No one has ever come back from the land

of the dead, and yours will be no ordinary resurrection.

Lean into the dream

I say to myself, listen, and then I hear an eerie whine. A squeak. A squeal.

A screech. An untuned scream that careens into my body and squeezes my lungs

like an airbag until my voice erupts in wild cacophony. I bend and sway,

but these howls keep rushing out of me. Then some secret wisdom sealed

in a shaft of forgetfulness bursts back into my memory, and I hear you say, “Yes,

it’s time.” You say you have control of my voice and you want me to do a solo,

so you move me out of the noise and into a quiet room where people can hear

the number. And I begin to hum, to murmur, to whisper . . . Sha-shu-rah . . .

sha-shu-rah . . . and for a moment I sound like breezes blowing through cypress

trees, like rainwater slipping over lapis blue stones. Sha-shu-rah . . .

sha-shu-rah . . .

I read the lines

of your text, I repeat the list of your names. Sister, Sha-zal-zal . . . You’re more

brilliant than two suns swirling in the sky. I recite your list of wonders, so the

people will remember your wisdom. Sal-zi-sha-zal-zal . . . There’s no doubt about

it. You raise your arms like wings and your wishes fly out between my trembling

lips like prayers escaping from the sweet long grasses. Sal-zi-sha-zal-zal . . .

sha-shu-shur-ah . . .

I’m the instrument

playing your mystical songs. I’m the priest chanting your holy words. I,

Enheduanna, the poet who writes this verse for you. I hold onto your words like

treasure, I wear your words like precious stones. And when I cup them in my

hands, they’re weightless, like petals from a dry rose, so I blow them to the north,

south, east, and west . . . and from my room high above the city your song drifts to

people everywhere.

Then the music ends

and I’m left alone in the dark, whispering my songs like a bird in the night.

I’m Enheduanna, I’m your priest. I’m your poet, but tell me, Inanna, am I sacred

or am I taboo? I’ve fallen into the hands of shadows, and as a smoldering south

wind blows cinders through the strings of my harp, smoky shapes rub dust

on my cheeks and cover my mouth, my song, my wild honey blessings. I try

to call to you, “Where is my voice?” But my mouth tangles your chants,

it twists your blessings. I try again, “Sister, do I pray? Sister, do I surrender?

Where is my voice? Where are my sweet words, the happiness I had in the

mountain crocus? My saffron satisfaction?”

Mountain waters turn to ash

the crocus is pounded into yellow sand, and you leave me squatting in the dust.

My pleasures crumble into gravel, my sweet words are pests on my lips.

Be wakeful, I say to myself, sit up. When the boat of heaven sails, it’s covered

in roses and thorns. It carries white cinders, it offers sooty gruel. It has no

windows, it has no air. “Where is my Sister,” I ask. “Where is my song?”

Hags fly on dragons through the red night sky, and I, I have no wings,

I have no torch. My soul is wasted. Go ahead and wrap me in the dark.

And now the usurper

this king of whateverland, has moved into my space, taken my work, stolen

my song. I look to the heavens and I wonder if the silver god I see in the sky is

real or if he’s just a pretender wearing the moon’s pale white skin. I call out

again, for my Sister, for Inanna, for the womanly god who can draw a circle

around the mockery of the proud stranger who anointed himself with my bloody

tears. He’s swaggering around the edges of my life, declaring his faith

in his poetry of grief—and he thinks he’s brilliant. It’s time to move him out

of the royal house, it’s time to cool off his oily kingship.

If you were here

Inanna, you’d surround that big man in the sky, toss him into the void and let him

sink into the gaps in the earth below. Inanna, until you come back my heart will

beat shum, tag, shum, shu, taka, ta, shum. My body will tremble shum, tag,

shum, shu, taka, ta, shum. My Sister, Inanna, my voice will quiver, but my mind

won’t be silenced. Accept my outrage as though it were your own, be my

guardian and steer this man out of my city. Sprinkle him with his own tears and

let him hold tight to his dismal verse as he falls from the throne, as he slips down

the shaft of anguish.

There are sparks in the sky

flashing from a bristly mane. Sister, is it you? Come, wrap your fiery hair around

this imposter and send him away. I’m Enheduanna, the priest who summons

your rich red passion. Let my muffled cry be your perfect sound, the soft wine

that quenches your dark thirst, the rain, the tears, the lament, everything good,

everything taboo. Magnificent Sister, the people are hiding like bats in the caves

by the river. Come, bring us back to our lives.

The intruder has bent our principles

twisted our traditions, broken our rules. He trespassed on holy ground

and now he’s occupied the heavens—north, south, east, west.

Ashimbabbar, Ashimbabbar, true god of the moon, how will we find

Ashimbabbar? His silver bow is veiled. The cool fire—his pure white light—is

invisible behind the imposter’s cloud of lies. The imposter shows no respect

for anything. He washes his hands, but it’s only to prepare another dirty trick.

He has broken into the sanctuary and ransacked the room where your sweet

songs were sung. E-bi . . . la-la-bi . . . ba-ra . . . mu-un-gi . . . hi-li-bi . . .

ba-ra . . . mu-un-til . . . e-bi . . . hul-á . . .

Your flutes have been burned and scattered

your roses have been smeared across the walls. It was a heavenly place, now

it’s just a corner in a house full of misery. Everything pure and good and brilliant

has been taken. Listen. The only sound now is the dismal song of a trembling

mountain bird. She sings about a strange wind that has blown over her land

driving the people away. She thinks she’s flying above the storm and tries

to scatter her song across the horizon, but the wind’s smoky breath stretches

her ribs flat like the strings of a lyre and tosses her into a snare of grass. Inanna,

wild impetuous Inanna, chase down this intruder, catch him in your wild red hair,

smother him in his own troubled haze.

This was a land of plenty

a place full of promise, but who knows what to do now? Who’s to say

what’s coming next? You color the sky with your curls—the fiery wool

of your hair—and I sit here listening as the night winds howl through broken

pipes. I’m keeping a vigil at the edge of a murky swamp. What am I supposed

to do now? Should I dig under, hollow out a space below the dusty waste?

Should I ferry myself across and tether my life over there?

Mother, father, moon and sky

will I leave tracks in the dust so I can find my way home, or will the oppressive

winds erase all memory of my path? Braid my desires into your hair as though

they were roses, Inanna, and carry me with you high into the heavens, to the space

above the moon. High.

This was a city

there were terraces where people drank music from cups that burst with laughter

and wisdom, but now memories come in splinters, like stars flashing through

broken windows. Nothing is clear. The heavens withhold their light. This place

has been abandoned. A smoky wind pushes deathbirds around . . . around . . .

around. Is this pestilent flock our only deliverance? Listen. It’s the voice of

a child crying, but there are no mothers to give her comfort. No mother oil

to be rubbed on her chalky lips, no mother water to quench her thirst, no mother

ice to cool her, no mother fire to warm her, no mother path to accept the terror

of her running feet. Only mother birds with mother talons who call out their dirges

from the sky and let them fall down to this godforgotten earth.

We need a hero

like you, Sister, a fearless champion to sail headlong into this abyss and lash your

boat to its thorn-infested shore. And me, I’m here singing your song now, today,

lying here on a bed of broken reeds—no white moon, no roses—only my voice

squealing like the bellows of a blacksmith keeping company with the dead.

The new moon is hiding behind a smoldering rain; I can’t see, there isn’t any light.

I’m cut off, left in this place of careless waste where there are no glossy leaves, no

blue-black berries, no wreaths of victory for those who survive. Ashimbabbar,

Ashimbabbar. Ashimbabbar. Is it you I see or is it still that big imposter in the

sky? Are you talking to me? Do you have plans for me?

Why should I keep singing? Words don’t stick to water and fire.

I was born to scale the mountain of desire

to move here and there, free and easy, in and out of the sun. I knew the taste

of power, the sweet perfume of influence, the scent of triumph, until he

came along, until he slipped into my chamber, until he trapped me in my retreat.

There were snares, there were teeth. My throat, my skin, my soul was eaten.

He gave me his animal horn, his ritual sword, he said it made me complete. I breathed

like a bird coming out of a hole, I flew like a swallow from the crevices of the mountain

and fell in the weeds and thorns below. He stripped me of everything—my crown,

my priesthood, even my life-giving rage.

Godly, godly Sister hero

you’re the spirit with the pure heart, the one who’s been anointed with youth

and charm and power and love. You’re the icon who sits among the cedars

and the stars. Inanna, hurry, take back your throne. You’re the mother of all ritual,

yours is the face of everyone who has come before. You’re the lover of the great

dragon in the sky, you and the firestorm are one. Ishkur-gim ushumgal-gim,

like thunder and lightning. When you track your passions across the heavens,

the gods of terror, the gods who gag us with fear, they bend and bow. Sing

us the songs of the dragon, Sister, sing us the songs of Ushumgalana.

The day you were born

they say the gods lit two brilliant suns in the sky and they twirled them like you

swing the rules of the universe from your wrists. Proud mothers and fathers, the

gods set you on a radiant path through the heavens and the earth; they filled your

bowl with water and music and abundance and splendor. You’ve always been

their favorite, Inanna, you’ve always managed to have your way. All the gods

and demons, the arrogant and the wise, they all bend and kiss the earth

at the thought of you wrapped in the parchment of your own skin, emerging

from the dead and alive place, returning from the holy interior, reclaiming

your power in the flickering light of this troubled day.

And me

what will be my fate? Will I emerge intact, ready to sing about the great woman

again, or will I spend my days flying in circles, fluttering with my people around

the edges of endurance—not like stars spraying up from the bonfires of victory

but like mites swarming around the ashy remains? Look at me. Do I look like

a hero? I was the brilliant one, the priest, the poet, the prince, the one whose

voice was moonlight, whose words echoed your desires. But now, when I return

to the sanctuary, will my hands smell of roses or of outrage?

Nobody knows this place like you

Sister, listen to me. You’ve streaked your power across the sky and poured it deep

into the earth. There’s not a soul who hasn’t heard about you—the daughter

of the moon—not a person who hasn’t heard your song. But if there is someone

who hasn’t heard about the great woman of heaven, listen now. I’m going to

sing about Inanna again . . . He-zú, he-zá, he-zu-á . . . I’m going to sing

about my Sister once again.

Inanna, you’re the deep blue lapis floating behind a rose-colored evening;

you’re the rich red comfort rising from an abundant motherland, the mountain

we cling to as we beg for mercy. You’re the impetuous one who moves across

the marshes weeping . . . soaking yourself in judgments . . . stamping your orders

with your royal seal . . . the wild spirit who drenches the strings of her harp

in turmoil.

You lap at blood

like a wild dog, you lift your eyes, your gaze is fierce, your eyes change, they roll,

they flash, red, yellow, they burn—igi-hush, igi-hush, igi-gun-gun, he-zú, he-zá,

he-zu-á. No one knows what rules you obey; you don’t pay attention to night,

you don’t pay attention to cold. You fly here and there, on this path on that path,

through water through fire. You stand. You stay. You prevail.

He-zú, he-zá, he-zu-á.

I’m not talking about the man in the moon

or some big man in the sky, I’m talking about Inanna, my Sister, the one

who wraps herself in the strings of the universe, the one who wears light

on her robe, the one who scatters stars from the heavens. My Sister, everybody

knows you’re loved by the gods and the people alike, you wear the crowns

of heaven and of earth. My holy Sister, I’m singing your song. I’ve measured out

the earth and the sky and the secrets of life, and I’ve poured them like milk into

your wooden bowl. I’ve watered your grasses and lit your fires and sung

the furious words of your prayers. The torches are burning, the winds are blowing

through your horns, and the people are washing and trembling as they reach

for your brilliance. Your temple has been rinsed and cleaned and draped with soft

woolen throws; in the sanctuary there are vases filled with roses, Sister, braid them

into your hair, cool your heart in the abundance of this sacred space.

And now it’s my time

while rain rushes from the north and south, I measure . . . measure count count . . .

breathe. While laughter splinters from the east and west, I measure measure . . .

count count . . . breathe. This is too much for me, Sister, this is enough for me,

Sister. I’m singing for you. I’m giving birth to your song, to the pure sounds

that flooded from me in the dark night, in your quiet room, Sha-shu-rah . . .

sha-shu-rah . . . Ahh-Ahh . . . Ooh-Ooh . . . Ahh-Ahh. I, your torch singer . . .

trembling like a bird . . . I whisper your secrets, I set your story to harmony.

And then, as though I were naming a child, I repeat it thirty times in the darkest

hour, my voice returning again and again like the flute of life to blow your song

into the light of the day . . . Ahh-Ahh . . . Ooh-Ooh . . . Ahh-Ahh.

How can you be calm

with the moon still shrouded, with your song still muted? Your anger hangs

heavy, you keep yourself wrapped in flames. It’s as though your lover

were captive, your child bound and gagged, as though you were still working

your way back from the other world. Sister, it doesn’t have to be so hard.

Come back to your temple. Set your heart at ease.

Heroes and dancers

and poets are coming with their harps. Look along the shore, they’re playing for you,

the magnificent one. Your songs are floating on the winds again, clearing

the haze, unveiling the radiant moon. The bold and brilliant throne is yours.

And now I see you rinsing your hands and rubbing them with sweet smelling oils.

Inanna, you’ve heard my prayers, you’ve heard my lament, and now you’re flying

like an arrow toward your people.

Push open the windows

blow the pipes, play the flutes, toss roses toward the stars. Inanna’s opening

her heart, she’s coming back, back to her sacred place. Beat the drums, raise

your cups, open the boxes filled with luxury and wrap yourself in godly softness.

She is here with us, dressed in her own beautiful power. The day is sweet, sing

your songs, eat the fruit, wear your ribbons and precious stones, and don’t long

for anything, we have it all. How wonderful, dressed in the light of the moon,

reflected in the folds of the rivers. How magnificent.

Now the people gaze

at the glow of white silk, the luster of joy, the radiance of the true moon.

And next to the moon is the great woman of heaven, how glorious she is!

The people bless her, the great mother, they spread their arms and pray.

Love. Health. Peace. The gates of the heavens are open. Silim-ma . . .

Silim-ma . . . Silim-ma.

And I, the woman who sang her song

the priest who prayed, the poet who spoke her lines,

I’m back from exile. I, Enheduanna, I’m not taboo.

My words are sacred because my song is for the wild one, for the mother

of Rhea, Hathor, and all the sacred cows jumping over the moon,

for the spirit who carries the secrets of the universe, for Inanna,

the womanly god wrapped in beauty and in strength. Silim-ma . . . Silim-ma . . .

Silim-ma.

Notes on a Jazz Reading of Enheduanna’s Signs

Any discussion of a jazz reading of cuneiform signs is essentially a discussion of free interpretation. In creating the forty-nine meditations on Enheduanna’s cuneiform signs, I have tried, in my regeneration of Enheduanna’s poem, to do as Walter Benjamin has suggested, to tap into “that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work.”[1] I have attempted to open Enheduanna’s text for a contemporary reading, all the while leaving her images unfettered by the expectations of the English language. In doing so, I have also broken with many of the standard practices of scholarly translation in order to make use of a number of approaches to both writing and meaning.

An interpreter of texts cannot—in the twenty-first century—rely solely on traditional methods in the translation and interpretation of literature. In her essay “Forms in Alterity: On Translation,” Lyn Hejinian reminds us of Samuel Beckett’s advice: “The original, ‘the work in front of you,’ he says, will always demand another translation. ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’”[2]

As a college professor of English, I often find myself advising my students to seek clarity in their writing, to lay their words down on the blank page in such a way that their readers are able to grasp, immediately, what it is that they want to say. “Keep it simple,” I hear myself telling them as I repeat the mantra my editors used when I worked in the news business. “Don’t get fancy.” Ink the words onto the page in a nonintrusive manner. Avoid typefaces that create fences between your readers and the message you want to send.

My advice reveals the fact that I am, from time to time, seduced into what Richard Lanham calls the Clarity-Brevity-Sincerity[3] school of thought—a school that espouses easy access to “correct” meaning, a way of thinking that suggests the very arrangement of words on the page offers a clear view of a “meaning,” that, in fact, there may be only one way of reading any given text. Don’t stop us while we’re reading the page, we seem to be saying, don’t make us consider an idea’s shape, or the color of a word, or the possibility that a phrase could have more than one meaning. We read as though we had found the Ur text, as though significance could be cast invisibly into stone. But when we rely on that “invisible” clarity, we, as readers, surrender our roles as participants in the making of meaning. We give up our freedom to interpret, and in doing so we thoroughly misread the historical reality of an actual Ur text—the original writing committed to stone and clay thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia.

When Enheduanna—poet, prince, and priest of the moon god at the city of Ur—pressed her wedge-shaped reed into soft clay to write her Ur text, her song to the deity Inanna, she was using cuneiform signs that had evolved from literal pictographs, signs that carried multiple meanings and which were combined in various ways with numerous other signs that also had multiple values. Using a rebus-style set of symbols, she created a work that can be read with all the ambiguity that poetry demands, a poem that can be amplified, stretched, and altered, all the while continuing to “mean.” Because Enheduanna wrote in Sumerian, she required an active reader who was willing to surmise which of many possible meanings she intended, how many of the many possible readings, or perhaps—since she was a poet, not a historian or journalist—a reader who might notice that she intended all of the many possible meanings. A single Sumerian sign may have five, ten, twenty, or more values, and in literary texts these multivalent signs are set next to other multivalent signs, introducing immense allusive possibility. Four thousand years ago, Enheduanna needed readers who were willing to improvise, rework, adjust, and rethink relationships between the signs, then reinvent the text as they interpreted her song to Inanna. This is the same kind of reader Barbara Page and Joan Retallack are talking about in Page’s discussion of women’s writing and hypertext, readers who are willing to offer “active participation” in an “ongoing textual process.”[4]

But this is not the common scholarly approach to the translation of ancient text. The scholarly formula for the interpretation of a Sumerian text is similar to the reading practice employed by proponents of the “Clarity-Brevity-Sincerity” school. Scholarly tradition calls for the use of a transliterative method, requiring the assignment of a single interpretation to a sign, locking in what is judged to be a “correct” meaning at the first stage of translation. Assigning specific fixed alphabetic and verbal values to each pictographic symbol allows the interpreter to limit the reader’s access to the Sumerian writer’s text. If the goal of the interpreter is to establish a historical record, a single view of a historical moment, this method manipulates the text toward that end.

The following is an example of a fixed reading of the first line of Enheduanna’s poem Nin-me-šar-ra in Sumerian cuneiform. Right beneath it is the Sumerian transliteration, as translated in the traditional method by William Hallo and J. J. A. Van Dijk, and below that is Hallo’s English translation.[5]

Although this has been the accepted way to translate these ancient texts, this method of assigning a singular meaning to the text turns the interpreter into the mis-interpreter.

Enheduanna is recognized as a poet and her work respected as a poem, and a “closed” interpretation moves us away from “other/additional/simultaneous texts.”[6] When this line is unbound, freed from the necessity of a single historical translation, the many values that might be attributed to the cuneiform signs become apparent. The following is another example of the first line of Enheduanna’s poem Nin-me-šar-ra in Sumerian cuneiform, with additional possible meanings that are available to the reader when the variant meanings of the signs in the first line are made visible.

As I have worked with Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šar-ra over the years, I have tried and tried again, failed and failed better. I have suggested that a feminist reading is in order as we look at the work of a woman who was the first in history to sign her text—a transgressive act in 2350 BCE—a good four thousand years years before Kristeva and others would tell us about the feminist nature of textual subversions. We might look at a line of Enheduanna’s poetry as though we were seeing a bundle of images and actions, a montage, something like Gertrude Stein’s “Word Heaps,” a “pastiche” that begs for fragmentation, explosion, and reinterpretation. When the possibilities of meaning are layered, simultaneously, one atop the other, layers of meaning in the first line of text make themselves visible.

Tigris sunrise
secret sister
go here measure go there
grand lion sunlight storm shining link
silver ring ruler who appears who is everything
come forth sweet sovereign blow white ringlets
strike the day
bliss

The explosion of meaning in this “word heap” differs significantly from Hallo’s scholarly translation, “Lady of all the me’s resplendent light.”

Enheduanna’s poem also reminds us of hypertext poetry, especially Jim Rosenberg’s stacks of “super-word, phrase clusters.” In Rosenberg’s hypertext, “to exist is to be combined, to be juxtaposed, to radiate from a layer, one of many layers.” In his discussion of electronic poetry, Rosenberg says the electronic poem alters “phrase into super-word, phrase cluster into an ignition where the resonances will seem to move, as a flame moves, though the words are fixed and do not change.” Rosenberg says his images stack “atop one another (as) simultaneities, as the world is full of simultaneities of lives, of thoughts, of desires, of reaching and refusals: the word not as a solo act but as a particle in a field, autonomous, an object in a field where to exist is to be combined, to be juxtaposed, to radiate from a layer, one of many layers. . . because to be in a packed cluster of circumstance is the natural condition of being.”[7]

The cuneiform line seen in this fashion calls to mind what Stephanie Strickland has described as “embeddedness” or “nestedness” in hypertext poetry.[8] Reading Enheduanna’s ancient poem through the screen of hypertext offers a de-centered, recentered and thoroughly ambiguous interpretation of Enheduanna’s work. Ambiguity is essential if we are to understand what the Sumerian poet wrote when she pressed signs into clay, for the signs themselves, multivalent and in some cases embedded one in another, make the poem.

This is the Sumerian woman writer’s “feminine text,” which, as Retallack says, “implicitly acknowledges and creates the possibility of other/additional/simultaneous texts.”[9] If we assign specific fixed alphabetic and verbal values to specific pictographic symbols, we move away from the Sumerian writer’s poem.

The pictographic signs in Enheduanna’s poem represent people and things; they describe action; they even express longing and desire. Linger over them as though you were watching a film, and you see their power. In my work with Enheduanna’s text, I have done that, considering the cuneiform text in light of what Adrian Miles has called the “allure of the cinematic” in hypertext.[10] When I applied a cinematic reading to the cuneiform, I could see that these signs were more than a collection of simultaneous designs and intentions, more than nouns, verbs, and invisible grammatical markers to be moved around and linked among. The meanings inherent in a single pictograph offer setting, actors, action, and intention—enough to suggest that each sign might be read as a single-take movie.

And finally, I have taken all of these approaches into consideration as I have applied a jazz aesthetic to Enheduanna’s cuneiform signs, opening them to meditation and improvisation. Hejinian says the task of poetry, the work of art, is “to restore the liveliness to life. . . . it must make the familiar remarkable, noticeable again; it must render the familiar unfamiliar.” In her view, the reader has before her an original text, one that she approaches with both understanding and fear, responding to the original text and offering “an alternative to it.”[11]

To offer as full an alternative as possible to the traditional translation of Enheduanna’s text, I have gone back to the moment before the syllabic transliterations used by historians, to the cuneiform signs themselves. When I was learning to decipher the Sumerian signs, I was impressed by my professor’s ability to read them fluently, translating directly from the signs into English. Because I have read Sumerian from the point of view of a poet rather than an Assyriologist, I have never mastered the skill of sight reading. But as I was working, I knew that I needed to make the signs—and the poet’s intentions—much more approachable. I wanted to see her patterns, recognize her sight rhymes, notice her inversions, and count her repetitions. Fortunately, each Sumerian sign has been given a specific numeric code—a number recognized by scholars around the world—and assembled into a glossary by Rene LaBat.[12] I went back to the signs, and to the codes assigned to each one, and did one more translation, this time into the numeric codes. With the entire poem set out in numbers, I could read more fluently; in fact, I could sight read the numbers and I could begin to approach the text. Here’s an example of how the numeric translation helped me interpret Enheduanna’s text: When I studied the numbers, I could easily see that Enheduanna was using sign number 172 repeatedly, sometimes three times in one line. Sign number 172 is one that traditional scholars have most often used as an invisible marker that carries grammatical meaning but does not denote person, place, thing, action, or intention. But this notion is only one of its several meanings. Sign number 172 also signifies fire, and once I could see that the poet inserted fire into her poem over and over again, I knew that she wanted her readers to catch the scent of smoke.

In a complete numeric draft of the poem, I have included all of the readings from the variety of copies of Enheduanna’s text that have been uncovered by scholars.[13] The following is a brief example of some of the numeric codes associated with the first line of Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šar-ra:

I have no difficulty riffing on Enheduanna’s signs when I see them as numeric codes. And it has also given me a way to play with Enheduanna’s “breath units” or “mind breaths” as Allen Ginsberg would call them.[14] Henry Louis Gates describes the jazz aesthetic as a form that “suggests a given structure precisely by failing to coincide with it, that is, suggests it by dissemblance.”[15] Repeating a form and then inverting it through a process of variation is central to jazz. Another essential quality of jazz is the acknowledgment of an existing line in the midst of its variation and inversion, the creation of the new from the existing, all the while freely appropriating and misappropriating utilitarian language. In Humming the Blues, I acknowledge established translations based on syllabic transliterations and locked—by traditional readings—into a single meaning. At the same time, I vary, invert, and improvise directly from Enheduanna’s signs. Applying the jazz aesthetic has allowed me to take my interpretation backward to re-examine the text through feminist, cinematic, transgressive, and subversive hypertextual lenses, to freely appropriate and misappropriate as I create a new poem from the existing one.

Jazz, according to John Gennari, is a form that dissents from “the logocentric tyranny of standard English, [and] eschews referential lyrics in favor of vocalized sounds”—creating units of meaning, message lines, scats—“whose meaning is their own sound.”[16] Amiri Baraka’s “It’s Nation Time” offers a scat whose meaning is its own sound:[17]

Boom

Boom

Boom

boom

Dadadadadadadadadada

Boom

As Gennari says, jazz is a “progenitor of new forms, an inventor of new languages, a creator of new ways to express meaning.” This is because “jazz’ semantics hinge on process, jazz generates new meanings with every performance.”[18]

This may be very close to what Enheduanna’s original readers found themselves doing every time they were “active participants” in an “ongoing textual process,” considering the multiple meanings of the cuneiform line and making the kind of “point-of-production creative choices” that Satchmo made in what Gennari has called—coincidentally—his “ur-scat.”

In my riffs on the signs that Enheduanna pressed into clay four thousand years ago, I have included some “ur-scat,” the traditionally transliterated syllabic units, sounds in this case, that offer their own meanings. They are not phonetic. We don’t really have any idea at all what this language sounded like.

We can only improvise, as I do freely in Humming the Blues, offering a new set of verses in a new language, inspired by Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šar-ra.

Cass Dalglish

Endnotes

Notes on the Introduction

1    Jones, Deb Dale. She Spoke to Them with a Stormy Heart: The Politics of Reading Ancient (or Other) Narrative. (Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 1993.) Jones coins the title “To Hell and Back Again” for Innana’s journey.

2    Stone, Merlin. When God Was a Woman. (New York and San Diego: Harvest Books, Harvest edition, 1978.)

3    Hallo, William W., and J.J.A. Van Dijk. The Exaltation of Inanna. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 2, 8, 9.

4    Ibid., p. 9.

5    The story line of Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šar-ra is one that I have gleaned from Sumerian texts, during work with Daniel Reisman and Deb Dale Jones, and continuing independent work. Other texts consulted in this work include translations by Hallo and Van Dijk (The Exaltation of Inanna) and Samuel Noah Kramer (“Hymnal Prayer of Enheduanna: The Adoration of Inanna in Ur,” in Ancient Near Eastern Texts, James Pritchard, ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

6    Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories, and Hymns from Sumer. (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1983.) I have based my retelling on this work. In addition, I consulted Deb Dale Jones and read her translation of the Innana story, She Spoke to Them with a Stormy Heart, and worked with Daniel Reisman, who guided my reading of The Descent of Ishtar in Akkadian cuneiform.

Notes on a Jazz Reading of Enheduanna’s Signs

1    Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt; translated by Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 80.

2    Beckett, Samuel, in Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 305.

3    Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 34.

4    Page, Barbara. “Women Writers and the Restive Text: Feminism, Experimental Writing and Hypertext.” Postmodern Culture, 6(2), January 1996. Reprinted in Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.) http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.196/contents.196.html   .

5    Hallo, William W., and J.J.A. Van Dijk. The Exaltation of Inanna. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 14, 15.

6    Retallack, Joan, quoted in Page, “Women Writers and the Restive Text. Feminism, Experimental Writing and Hypertext.” Postmodern Culture, 6(2), January 1996. Reprinted in Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.) http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.196/contents.196.html   .

7    Rosenberg, Jim. “Foldings, to the Chord Trellis Relate-Shape Draw, Notes for the Appearance of Diffractions through and The Barrier Frames.” Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext, 2(3), Summer, 1996.

8    Strickland, Stephanie. Talk given at Hamline University, St. Paul, MN, April 10, 1997, http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr5/strick.htm   .

9    Retallack, Joan, quoted in Page, “Women Writers and the Restive Text.”

10    Miles, Adrian. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/essays/cinema_paradigms/history.html   . This essay first appeared as “Cinematic paradigms for hypertext” in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 13(2), July 1999, pp. 217–226.

11    Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry, pp. 301, 305.

12    LaBat, Rene. Manuel D’Epigraphie Akkadienn. (Paris: Librairie Orientalist Paul Geuthner, S.A. Nouvelle Edition, Revue et Corrigèe, 1976.)

13    Unpublished numeric translation produced by Cass Dalglish from Sumerian texts of Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šar-ra.

14    Allen Ginsberg is quoted in Gennari, John. “Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies,” Black American Literature Forum, 01486179, 25(3), Fall 1991, Academic Search Premier.

15    Henry Louis Gates is quoted in Harris, William J., The poetry and poetics of Amiri Baraka: the Jazz Aesthetic. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), p. 15.

16    Gennari, John. “Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies,” Black American Literature Forum, 01486179, 25(3), Fall 1991, Academic Search Premier.

17    The poem appears in William J. Harris, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: the Jazz Aesthetic. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985.)

18    Gennari, John. “Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies,” Black American Literature Forum, 01486179, 25(3), Fall 1991, Academic Search Premier.

Cass Dalglish is a poet and novelist who studied Sumerian cuneiform to find women’s earliest writing. She holds a PhD from Union Institute and is associate professor of English at Augsburg College. She was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award for her novel Sweetgrass (Lone Oak Press) and is the author of Nin (Spinsters Ink).

Acknowledgments

Humming the Blues came into being because of the work of a woman poet who wrote her hymn to Inanna over four thousand years ago. I am grateful to Enheduanna for the beautiful images she pressed into clay. I am also indebted to Daniel Reisman, Deb Dale Jones, and Diane Wolkstein, my teachers, mentors, and guides in the interpretation of Nin-me-šar-ra.

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