Down in Ancient Sumer

By Cheryl Morgan

I’m probably not the best person in the world to be reviewing poetry, but I do have a strong interest in mythology, and when I heard that Catherynne M. Valente was producing a series of long-form poems based on "descent into the underworld" myths I was going to be first in the queue for review copies. Especially as the first title in the series happened to be The Descent of Inanna. I might not know much about poetry, but I am probably one of the few people in the SF&F community who owns a translation of the original Sumerian poem (Wolkstein & Kramer, for those who are interested).

[Note for the mythologically challenged: Inanna is the Sumerian original from which the Babylonian goddess, Ishtar, was derived. She’s sort of a combination of Venus and Diana. The poem tells the story of her journey into the underworld to visit her sister, the death goddess, Ershkigal.]

As poetry goes, translations of Sumerian religious verse don’t stack up to well. I suspect that the original material was designed for chanting rather than to be read, and after translation it looses any rhyme and scansion it might have had. It ends up sounding rather like a literal translation of the libretto for the chorus of an Italian opera. Nevertheless, it still has some punch.

Faced with material like this, what Valente has done is try to transform the story into something that retains the spirit of the original but is rather more in tune with modern sensibilities. She keeps much of the repetitive nature of the original, but at the same time she freely uses modern terms and idioms where they add to the text. One of my favorite parts of her adaptation is the section in which Inanna is trying to persuade Neti, gatekeeper of the underworld, to let her in. The original goes like this:

Valente’s version plays up the level of insult that Neti gives Inanna (which is found in other parts of the original). It adds a lot to the sense of pagan religious concepts, and it drops in a very modern last line.

Valente is also very much aware that the dispute between Inanna, Queen of Heaven, Goddess of Love and War, and her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, is a classic female rivalry. In deference to the Sumerian origins of the tale she allows Inanna to keep her dark hair (in a true American version she would be blonde and Ereshkigal dark). But she also recognizes the Hollywood nature of the confrontation between the sisters.

Overall I think Valente has produced a very nice balance between keeping the spirit of the original and making it more approachable to a modern audience. I’m very much looking forward to future poems in the series.

The bad news is that initially the seven poems will only available as limited edition hardcovers at $50 each. They’ll be beautifully produced, but beyond the means of most of us. (And Papaveria were serious about limited – I reviewed the poem from a PDF.) However, late next year, once all seven individual poems have been released, a paperback compilation of all seven poems will be issued. If you want to buy Inanna now, the Papaveria web site is your best bet.