I began teaching my first summer class this week: a section of World Literature I.  When I planned the class, I decided to do something I’ve never done before — I decided to abandon the confines of the anthology and teach entire texts.  We’ll read Gilgamesh, Hecuba (which I’ve never taught before and am quite excited about), the entire Bhagavad Gita, Heaney’s Beowulf, and Macbeth.  With the exception of Macbeth, each are texts or translations I’ve never taught before.  After I turned in my book order, I began to panic a bit, but am now glad, if only because I’ve discovered that Maureen Gallery Kovacs’ translation of Gilgamesh is pretty much awesome and amazing.

I was particularly impressed by her translation of Gilgamesh’s curse against Ishtar.  Since starting the witch project, I’ve been interested in the power we attribute to language — in particular, the power language can have to harm — and have been paying a great deal of attention to the way we construct language that’s meant to do harm.  The Upanishads present an interesting take on this, implying that language has the power to harm because language is, in itself, a great power.  Take, for instance, Yajnavalkya’s statement in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:

Then speech is our light, for by that we sit, work, go out, and come back.  Even though we cannot see our own hand in the dark, we can hear what is said and move toward the person speaking.

Gilgamesh also seems to imply the same sense that language is power, and that powerfully harmful language has its consequences.  There’s no question that his curse against Ishtar is incredibly powerful, and also strikingly modern:

You are an oven who … ice,
a half-door that keeps out neither breeze nor blast,
a palace that crushes down valiant warriors,
an elephant who devours its own covering,
pitch that blackens the hands of its bearer,
a waterskin that soaks its bearer through,
limestone that buckles out the stone wall,
a battering ram that attracts the enemy land,
a shoe that bites its owner’s feet!

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is that it seems that the curse — the most harmful thing that can be said — has the most to do with the harm one causes one’s self and others, that the utterance of this is the worst thing a person — or, in this case, a goddess — can hear.