Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reading Sumerian Poetry: Samuel Johnson and David Hume

Reading Sumerian Poetry: Samuel Johnson and David Hume

Black, Jeremy

Hardcover

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 0801435986
ISBN13: 9780801435980
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: Dec 4 1998
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.98 Width: 6.36 Depth: 9.49
Language: English

An international authority on Sumerian culture, Jeremy Black here provides an introduction to the world's oldest poetry. Sumer, in southern Iraq, was the first literate culture in civilization, dating as far back as 2500 b.c. Its literature, which is made up almost entirely of poetry, was lost for nearly two millennia; rediscovery and decipherment of the ancient texts began in the nineteenth century.Black is fully aware of the difficulties of applying modern literary methods to the study of ancient literature, emphasizing theoretical problems that arise from contemporary expectations of a unitary text. Acknowledging the fragmentary nature of Sumerian poetry, he turns what might be considered a serious obstacle to the enjoyment of the literature into an asset. The book features Black's complete English translations of Lugalbanda, a narrative poem about the eponymous hero and his encounter with a monstrous bird, and its sequel, Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave. Looking closely at the imagery in the Lugalbanda poems, Black perceives in them a rich and sophisticated poetic imagination and technique, which, far from being in any sense primitive, are so complex as to resist modern literary analysis.

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