Enheduana: the Complete Poems of the World’s First Author

Enheduana: the Complete Poems of the World’s First Author, addresses exile, social disruption, gender identity, the devastation of way, the forces of nature – topics as relevant today as they were four thousand years ago. In Sophus Helle’s astute translation, they retain their intensity and imagistic power.

Enheduana is the first poet whose name we know. There are stories and poems far older than hers – as much as five hundred years older – but they are all anonymous. In the annals of world literature, Enheduana marks the earliest known appearance of authorship: the idea that there is a person behind the text, speaking to us across time. And yet, despite her pride of place in history and despite the exceptional beauty of her hymns, the world has forgotten about Enheduana. Western literary history instead begins with Homer, a man who sang his songs some fifteen hundred years after her death. Today, Enheduana is known only by a small circle of academics and enthusiasts, but she deserves better.

Enheduana lived around 2300 BCE, and it can be hard to grasp the gap in time that lies between us and her: Julius Caesar lived closer in time to us than to Enheduana. It is nothing short of miraculous that this ancient woman’s voice has survived the passing of centuries, if only as an echo etched into clay, revised and rewritten over many generations. Enheduana served as high priestess in Ur. (from the Introduction to the book)

All of Enheduanna’s poems are hymns, and the best known of these are hymns to Inanna, a complex and compelling goddess of the ancient world.  The book opens with beautiful translations of The Exaltation of Inanna, and then The Hymn to Inanna.

“Helle’s translation feels urgent, incandescent, stripped of academic cladding.” Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times

From Yale University Press
260 pages