
Why Has No One Heard of the World's First Poet? (2017) - apollinaire
https://lithub.com/why-has-no-one-ever-heard-of-the-worlds-first-poet
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lucozade
I'm going to hazard a guess that the answer to the question in the title is a
combination of:

\+ she wasn't even well known to specialist academics until the late 60's.

\+ the works really aren't very interesting to anyone other than said
specialists.

I mean, we're talking about a number of short hymns to obscure temples. Not
exactly the Iliad.

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empath75
The reason everyone knows who Homer was or who Sappho was is that there was a
continuous line of people quoting them and being inspired by them, from
Ancient Greece to today. There were probably Greek poets before homer that we
just don’t know about and even if we did discover a pile of pre-Homeric Greek
poetry, most people would never study it or learn about it.

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mcguire
" _In any case, we have an almost divine-like ability to take ultra-
fascinating ideas and make them slightly less exciting than a traffic ticket.
This is not the skill you need when trying to present the results of your
research to a Netflix-addled public. No wonder no one knows Enheduanna’s
name._ "

This is entirely true.

Sumerian literature is fascinating and hilarious. Those translaters, though...

(Has anyone mentioned that Gilgamesh offered to get the monster Humbaba a wife
if he would give them the cedars---the suggested wife being the father of
Gil's rival, the king of Kish?)

~~~
ksdale
Haha I remember thinking that when I read the Epic of Gilgamesh in school. I
thought, “this story can not possibly be as boring as the translation is
making it.”

Years later, reading all different sorts of literature in a effort to make
myself “more cultured,” I realized how different certain pieces of literature
made me feel (I know, duh) despite them all being written originally in
English, and I despaired that even great translations were probably cutting
out or changing a lot of meaning.

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mcguire
Weirdly, I was just watching a video
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYSqscmp_f0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYSqscmp_f0))
of a lecture by Andrew George (who has a recent translation of Gilgamesh) at
the Oriental Institute, where he discusses the difficulties of and approaches
to translating Sumerian.

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graeme
The first novel was most certainly not in the 11th century.

There's still a published Roman novel, the metamorphisis. And there were
others which were lost.

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astazangasta
The Metamorphoses is not a novel. It isn't prose and it isn't narrative. A
better candidate is Apuleius' "The Golden Ass".

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graeme
That's one and the same. The Metamorphosis of Apuleis, otherwise known as the
golden ass ;)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass)

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DarkWiiPlayer
What the text doesn't mention is that she was the daughter of Sargon the
Great.

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bjoli
Well, almost everyone knows about the existence of Sumerian poetry, or at
least of the epic Gilgamesh (which should have been at least mentioned in
school).

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makach
..it is impossible to know who was the first..?

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DarkWiiPlayer
Dammit, I was so damn proud that I knew this xD

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thaumasiotes
Obviously, because writing didn't exist at the time.

~~~
jhbadger
True, but what is meant by the term here is "first poet that we have evidence
for existing" \-- there are tablets of this Sumerian priestess/poet Enheduana.

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justtopost
Existing, and signed.

Many preexisting poems and works by poets survive. I think the author was a
bit liberal with the phrasing for a better title.

~~~
yesenadam
"Please don't tease us! Some actual information would be nice." \- sctb

