> the humor is repetitious and hard to embrace

the world's oldest joke - a Sumerian rib-tickler dating back to 1,900 BC which goes: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/01/oldest_joke/

Explain ancient humor to me. I am all for embracing it.

The Greeks had some rather sarcastic humor in various plays. The Egyptians had no sense of humor, neither did the Romans. But the Sumerians are funny.

http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr551.htm

talking of greeks, it seems worth mentioning laconic humor. The "if"[0] thing is still funny after centuries, imo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase#Uses

"Nuts."

The ancient Egyptians had a sense of humor. The problem is that ancient Egyptian literature is usually only read by people who are learning the Egyptian language. Wenamun is a comedy of errors. Setne Khamwas contains slapstick. Hathor's rampage across the earth in the form of Sekemet is ended with massive quantities of beer dyed red.

How do we know the Egyptians or the Romans had no sense of humor? A lacking written record proves only that: a lacking written record. Can you imagine a society w/o laughter?

Every expert seems to look down on the Stephen Mitchell version. I happened to read and enjoy it, not as a scholar of the ancient near east but just as a text that happened to be in front of me.

Is there a more detailed breakdown of what's wrong with it? I seem to only find generalities.

Yeah, I'm not claiming it's accurate, but what do you expect from a mushy modern version? I've read Mitchell's version, as well as couple different scholarly translations, but it's been years and I don't think I could cite specific differences besides cutting out most of the super repetitious parts (Babylonian comedians thought it was funny to say the same thing way too many times when describing a long journey) and filling in broken sections with words that worked well enough to continue the story. My memory of his Tao Te Ching "translation" is a bit better, and it's usually the one I recommend to people who have never read the Tao Te Ching just becauee it's worded so beautifully. He has some changes I really dislike, though; at one point he replaces a line about animals being like "straw dogs" (a sacrificial idol crushed under foot in a traditional ceremony) to the tao and people being like straw dogs to the master with a line that promotes pacifism, which is the change I hated most due to it actually seeming antithetical to what most scholars translate the passage as. He also replaces references to ancient weaponry with references to nuclear weapons, and stuff like that -- but I don't think he gave Gilgamesh an AK, as far as I recall ;)

The "same thing way too many times" is common in most oral epics, it helps the teller to remember, and the audience to follow along. So you get formulaic things in Homer like "darkness covered his eyes" each time someone dies in battle, for example. Gilgamesh and Enkidu walking and walking to the forest to battle with Humbaba also helps drive home just how far away they went, which is to say, to some magical far-off land, another popular trope in plenty of stories.

The mechanics of oral poetic storytelling are super interesting. Stock tags like “darkness covered his eyes” are chosen by the poet because they have the correct number of syllables to finish the line. The poet would have a number of alternative phrases ready to fit the meter as needed.

There’s even a theory that this mode of extemporaneous oral composition actually requires that the poet be illiterate. The thinking is that it’s a completely different, sound-first approach to language that literacy totally breaks. In order to compose fluently (not recite, the way we understand today), the poet has to understand a phrase like “darkness covered his eyes” as a discrete unit of meaning made up of syllables, not a composition of independent words.

It is almost like this kind of oral poetry is its own separate kind of "literacy" separate from being able to write and being able to speak conversationally. Definitely a different set of words and skills.

Yeah, that’s a really good way to put it. I don’t ha e the background to speak on whether the “illiterate bard” theory is actually true, but I find the idea that some kinds of literacy could be mutually exclusive totally fascinating.

Many of the pre-Christian European peoples did not have written languages or used them extremely sparingly - oral tradition poetry was how information was stored and communicated. Notice how all of Europe uses mostly Roman letters (the Christians also unfortunately burned most of the existing culture when they converted a population which is also why the Norse legends come mostly from Icelandic, one of the last places to really convert because of its remote location)

Not to mention literacy wasn’t even particularly common in Europe until relatively recently. The work on Homer I’m thinking of (Parry and Lord) is based on oral traditions that were still alive in prewar Yugoslavia.

This is another great New Yorker story on the Indian oral storytelling tradition which goes into the oral vs. written thing a bit (paywalled - sorry)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/11/20/homer-in-india

Was Shakespeare not a poet?

Talking specifically about oral epic poetry a la Homer or the Serbian heroic oral tradition. Shakespeare’s a totally different bag.

I've heard that Ursula Le Guin's version is also quite good. If you're familiar with it I'd like to hear your opinion.

https://www.amazon.com/Lao-Tzu-Ching-About-Power/dp/15706239...

I heard good things about it from a sibling, but besides changing the traditionally translated pronouns of the master I don't know much about it TBH. The original Chinese used ambiguous pronouns due to the language itself, most English translations have traditionally made the master male, Mitchell alternates between male and female pronouns, and I think Le Guin is supposed to use either feminine or ambiguous pronouns (I'm forgetting which).