On Translating the World’s First Author: A Conversation with Sophus Helle
By Tatiana Hollier
© Maiken Kestner
“What would the history of literature look like if it began, not with Homer and his war-hungry heroes, but with a woman from ancient Iraq, who sang her hymns to the goddess of chaos and change?”
— Sophus Helle, Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author
Sophus Helle is a writer, translator, cultural historian, and a disarmingly lucid thinker, whose passion for the ancient Near East is as electrifying in person as it is on the page. Helle’s translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh was published to great acclaim in 2021 and was a runaway bestseller in his native Denmark. He has also written on subjects as wide-ranging as the climate crisis, Mayan creation myths, and the impact of ChatGPT.
In March, Helle will publish a new translation of another ancient text: the poems of Enheduana, the world’s earliest known author, who lived in around 2300 BCE. The daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, Enheduana served as the High Priestess of the Moon God in the Sumerian city of Ur, located in what is today southern Iraq. Many of her poems are dedicated to the deity Inana, a figure Helle describes as “the single most complex and compelling goddess of the ancient world,” and include Exaltation of Inana, Hymn to Inana, and a collection of forty-two Temple Hymns.
Columbia Journal sat down with Helle on an unseasonably warm January morning to discuss his breakthrough translation, the concept of authorship, and the many parallels between Enheduana’s world and ours.
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TH: I thought we could start by discussing your journey towards Enheduana. What was your initial impression of her poetry?
SH: This journey is interesting in comparison to the other main text I’ve worked on, the Epic of Gilgamesh. A lot of what I did there was try to summarize 150 years of research, then try to make sense of it all for myself. With Enheduana, it’s been the reverse. There’s so little out there about her, so my journey has felt a bit like stepping into darkness. It took me five years of work to get a sense of what Enheduana’s poem Exaltation of Inana is about. And I think I got a sense of how Hymn to Inana works, how it’s structured, why it works the way it does, just a few months before I submitted the manuscript. There’s a lot of basic sense-making with Enheduana, in part because the literature on her is not extensive, but also because of the nature of her poems. They are so compact, the Sumerian language itself is so challenging, and the Sumerian she uses in her poems is itself so unusual. I write in the book about her poems being “a torrent of images.” It took me a long time to get at some of the structures that underlie those torrents of images and see how her poems are very precisely patterned.
TH: In your Introduction, you write that Enheduana marks the earliest known appearance of authorship, which you describe as “the idea that there’s a person behind a text speaking to us across time.”
SH: When I say that Enheduana is the world’s first author, I mean this is the first time a literary text is attributed to an identifiable historical person. There are texts that are older, but with Enheduana, a text and a historical individual are linked for the first time. Now that link is suspect in some ways because the manuscripts attributed to Enheduana come 500 years after her death, and the style of the Sumerian language in which they’re written was not one that she would have spoken. Those things can be explained if you are a pro-Enheduana’s-authorship kind of scholar. It’s very normal for Sumerian texts to only be found in manuscripts from what’s called the Old Babylonian Period, because this is a period where we see an explosion of manuscripts from the scribal curriculum, and it’s quite normal for their language to be adapted over time. So those things are not in themselves unusual, but they do leave a question mark hanging over Enheduana’s authorship, one that I don’t think will ever be fully resolved. The important point for me is that Enheduana marks the beginning of authorship as a concept: the idea that a text is not born out of some collective anonymous tradition.
TH: In the middle of the Exaltation of Inana, the speaker declares: “I am the High Priestess, I am Enheduana.” There’s a staggering simplicity to this verse. I’m curious how you understand Enheduana’s decision to make herself known, and announce her presence in her poetry.
SH: If we assume that these texts are written by the real historical Enheduana, she would have lived through a period of extreme political and cultural turbulence, so it’s not surprising that new developments in literary history should arise. Everything was changing because the Akkadian emperors were creating a new kind of political entity, and brought in all sorts of new wares. There was a real sense of the expansion of the world. At the same time, these Akkadian emperors were unpopular, so this was also a period of great instability and revolt. This is also captured in Enheduana’s poems because Inana is a goddess of instability, as well as being the patron goddess of this new empire. Enheduana’s poems are about everything being turned upside down, which makes sense in her cultural moment. There are also new forms of self-representation among the ruling elite. The King Naram-Sin, who would’ve been Enheduana’s nephew, famously declares himself a living god.
TH: I remember reading about how, under the Emperor Naram-Sin, the writing technology went through such a massive shift that the script itself rotated by 90 degrees. The sheer amount of change in this era feels inconceivable.
SH: That’s one of those parallels that is directly relevant to today, especially if you think of the technological changes that are going on with AI, programs like ChatGPT, which are reshaping our sense of authorship and creativity now. I think the same was true of Enheduana. She lived during a time of dramatic cultural and technological change, in writing technology but also other kinds of technology, which allowed for new kinds of creativity.
TH: Given that you are a writer yourself, I’m curious whether your personal conception of authorship has changed after interacting so closely with Enheduana’s poetry and legacy?
SH: Not so much in terms of me as a writer, but more as the son of two writers. There’s a lot of co-creation in Enheduana’s work. I’ve looked at the way, for example, Enheduana’s authorial “I” emerges from a dialogue with the goddess Inana; but also the way the poem signals that it is circulating thanks to the labor of performers who are presenting the poem. And we know that the poem exists thanks to the labor of scribes. This project was also very collaborative. It’s my name on the cover but the acknowledgements matter, and my partner was a big part of choosing the poetic style, and taste-testing everything that came her way. I’ve compared the notion of authorship to a classical portrait, which might show a single person but all sorts of people participate in making it.
TH: You’ve written about the literary critic Matthew Reynolds’ idea of “prismatic translation,” which you describe as “the way multiple translations of a single work tend to defract the many aspects that are contained within that work.” What aspects of Enheduana’s poetry were you trying to illuminate in your translation?
SH: I’m happy you bring up Matthew. I do think translations work best when they almost asymptotically build towards the original through their shared differences, and that’s why it’s so wonderful to work with ancient literature that is devoid of copyright issues because you can translate work again and again, and readers can get a fairly good sense of what the original is like by reading different translations. My translation tries to capture her literary intensity. Matthew’s first book The Poetry of Translation revolves around the idea that translators often seize on an image within the text and use that image as a translational program. The image I seized on in translating Enheduana is the image of honey. She compares her own speech to honey (“My honey-mouth is full of froth”), which I found interesting because honey is very sweet, but also very dense, and flows in this weird way. Its viscosity is a strange thing, in physics as well as in poetry. I think much of what I’ve tried to do in this translation is to capture this sense of compactness and intensity, but also its elegance, poetic sweetness.
TH: When I first read Enheduana’s poems, their lyric intensity reminded me of the Greek poet Sappho’s fragments—the compactness of Sappho’s language and the intimacy of her voice come to mind.
SH: The comparison between Sappho’s Fragment 1 and Enheduana’s Exaltation of Inana is interesting: these are both hymns written by female authors who name themselves in their poems. They address a confounding goddess and engage in a poetic dialogue; at moments, both seem to almost efface the difference between author and deity, before asserting this difference in other ways. One of the differences worth pointing out is that a lot of recent research on Sappho is focused on bringing up the more political elements of her work, and the ways in which she was embedded in networks of power. But these political elements that are alluded to in Sappho’s work are foregrounded in Enheduana’s poetry. Enheduana is a very political poet.
TH: Do you think Enheduana has a particular political agenda in her work?
SH: I don’t think she has a single political message, but I do think she is a poet of empire, and trying to get around that will get you into difficult places. Exaltation of Inana is about the suppression of a rebellion, and the reversals, paradoxes, metaphors, and contradictions contained in her poems very much have to do with the political context of the time. It’s less that she has an agenda, more that she was writing in a political context.
TH: Did Sappho come to mind when you first read Enheduana, or were there other reference points?
SH: I was looking at a lot of religious poetry. It was poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins or Emily Dickinson, who strain and stretch language to describe something about their experiences of the divine, that I found most useful. Enheduana made more sense to me when I viewed her through some of those figures.
TH: I’m curious to hear more about your translation process. Anne Carson claimed that, when translating Sappho, she “tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find using, where possible, the same order of words and thoughts that Sappho did.” Did you have any guiding principles or mantras when working on your translation?
SH: I think for me it was the opposite. I came to a translation that I was more or less satisfied with through a series of recognitions of what was missing. An iterative process of saying “this is not yet right.” That’s how, for example, I came to breaking up the lines of Enheduana’s poems, which arose from the recognition that if I didn’t do that, the verses felt bulky, and there’s nothing bulky about Enheduana’s poems. If I actually let the lines match semantically, they wouldn’t match poetically because English takes, say, fifteen words to say what Enheduana says in four.
TH: The line breaks in your translation are striking. Her words are given so much room to breathe.
SH: In contemporary poetry, line breaks are often used to accentuate the final word, but that isn’t the case in my translation. I often try to use the line breaks to emphasize word patterns, and I’m perfectly happy with the last word in a line being “the” or “and” because that lets me do other things and helps me create an almost viscous intensity.
I do have a mantra as a historian, which is this line that I’ve included in the book: “history makes the present strange,” that looking back at how things we take for granted were done very differently means that they could be done very differently. And that connects in part with this sense of chaos and change in Enheduana’s poetry. It’s an imperial poem, but not an imperial poem that shuts things down.
TH: In the Introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh, you write: “as a restless young man myself, I can’t deny that I also feel a connection to Gilgamesh,” the hero of the epic. I was moved by this line, its transparency and the personal dimensions it suggests. How do you relate to Enheduana?
SH: I feel like I’m living through a time of overwhelming chaos and change, which I don’t know how to handle intellectually, or poetically for that matter. The real Enheduana would probably have lived through a period of traumatic climate change—but not man-made, so that’s a major difference. But there are other kinds of manmade destruction that feature in her work, and she definitely depicts a world that seems dangerous, unpredictable, both in terms of the natural forces, like floods streaming down mountains, but also her depiction of war, which is so psychologically resonant with kinds of conflict that are relevant today. As I write in the book, war is unheroic in Enheduana’s poems. It is not a place of achievement but a place of loss, tragedy and destruction, where humans figure almost exclusively as victims.
TH: There are many mysteries about Enheduana, so many unanswerable questions. For you, what is the greatest mystery?
SH: There’s more mystery than fact, more that is not known than what is known, and I think that’s an interesting aspect of Enheduana. Then again, as I say in the book, the fact that we know anything is miraculous in itself. I would rather focus on the fact that we at least know something. It’s almost hard to pick out a greatest mystery because it just seems like mystery is what there is. And that can be either frustrating or liberating.
For more resources on Enheduana, visit Enheduana.org.
About the author
Tatiana Hollier
Tatiana Hollier is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at Columbia University, and is writing a biography of Enheduana, the world’s earliest-known author. Her work has been published in the New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Oxonian Review, Mitos Magazín, and Solar Journal.
