Original: A 7478

Translator’s Note

A 7478  is an Akkadian love poem from Sippar or Nippur (1900–1600 BCE). In Akkadian, logograms represent syllables, so though there are over fifteen hundred signs of A 7478, there are less than a thousand referents. These syllables form roots, prefixes, and suffixes, and rest their legibility on Sumerian, the only language that prevenes Akkadian. Poems like A 7478 are regularly found and highly favored; version after version of these love poems are recovered from one archaeological ruin to the next. This reveals an oral history that overruns in the tablets, and a readership that insists for more.

The lines of this poem fill the obverse, reverse, and verges of A 7478. They are utterances from a first-person feminine narrator to her partner, a third- and second-person masculine recipient. Italicized in this rendering is also third voice, the narrative’s voice, interrupting the lovers and their verses. The narrator is in love. She reveals this through regular references to her hunger for the recipient, to the “flesh-pleasures” he offers her, or the tender names they calls the other (“my pet,” “master”); she likens their relationship to various forms of nature, fruit, ritual offerings. The two are removed from one another, though—the narrative tells us that their lives no longer relate, their trails no longer cross. Rather than in link, “he follows … her,” and then, “they follow one another.” “The years have set and fallen” like this, she recites, “the moment of return / refuses us as a mother.”

The narrator nonetheless reaches for her lover, looking for the flirtation she recalls in their relationship. “Flirtations” is, I think, the most fitting name for this poem. The feminine narrator knows the feel of her lover’s flirtations, longs for it. “you fasten a natality for me in strings,” she tells him. And she herself flirts—with the memory of him, with her narration, her form. He is a “flash” in her history, yet the request on her lips never changes: “[let me] have parts of you as a rite.” “Flirtations” recognizes the poem’s courting. It also recognizes its moments of vulgarity, and of heightened need (those “flesh pleasures,” the “hunger”).

The narrator’s rhetoric is, orthographically, not regular. There are lines of kink here—she lyricizes herself in “oil,” or, in “ropes”—and there are lines that feel tenderer—she lingers, halfway through, to look at her lover “sip” and rest near the Tigris, less a voyeur than a thrall. She is his “feminine veneration,” and he her fetish; she is a “net holder” and he her catch. Rhetoric of the erotic lies next to rhetoric of the natural, for her. 

My rendering tries to honor how the narrator teases language. It is poetic, and leans from more familiar referents. An example is the final line. “I, through / your reverence, / through your flirtation, and your favor, find my refuge.” Others have left this as “through your love-making,” or something even racier. In “flirtations,” though, I have kept the flow, the faithfulness, the longing, in the voice of the narrator that, though elsewhere vulgar, in these verses expresses only the feeling of release (via her lover and from him).

In a final note, this archive is fragmented in a material sense—there are rifts in face of A 7478, some small and some not. Artifacts from the ancient Near East often have this look, this feel. Rows of ellipses in the narrative reflect this, and they are kept in my rendering. “i received… / steady heaving,” the narrative inhales, exhales, “…in each vessel-site, / … as heaven is heavy.” These verses have the feel of language expressed in love, like the narrator is lunging for respiration. The result of this is a poem that rifts and heaves, in and past the narration.