The occasion is Simon Armitage's new version of Gilgamesh, reviewed in the Guardian on 20 October, but the argument the two letter-writers are making reaches well past any single translation. Philip Terry's review apparently describes Shamhat, the woman who civilises Enkidu through sexual union, as a 'sex worker' — and Simon Dawson's letter lands the correction cleanly: the Akkadian term doesn't mean what we mean by that phrase. She is a priestess of Ishtar. The act is sacred, not transactional. Translating her as a sex worker is not a neutral choice; it retrofits a Christian-inflected moral economy onto a culture that preceded it by two millennia. Dawson cites Stephen Mitchell's translation introduction, which notes that Shamhat is 'a kind of reverse nun' who has dedicated her life to the sacred mysteries of sexual union in Ishtar's service. The erotic, in Mesopotamian theology, was a legitimate vehicle for transcendence and transformation — which is precisely the function Shamhat performs. Enkidu begins the story as a wild man living among animals. After seven days with Shamhat he can speak, think, and enter Uruk as a human. That is not what a commercial transaction does to a person. The second problem Dawson names is the description of Gilgamesh and Enkidu's bond as 'a celebration of same-sex physical love.' That framing imports contemporary identity categories — built on a post-Stonewall understanding of sexuality as a discrete component of selfhood — into a world where no such category existed. When Gilgamesh covers Enkidu's dead face 'like a bride' and walks into the wilderness in grief, the poem is doing something more structurally fundamental: it is showing us that the loss of a beloved companion — one whose bond was forged in the erotic, the martial, and the spiritual simultaneously — can break a king and set him on the road toward confronting mortality. The poem's subject is not gay love. It is what grief does to a man who thought he was invincible. Fiona Collins raises a related but distinct problem: the word 'translation' is being applied to Armitage's work when it should be called an adaptation. Unless Armitage reads cuneiform — which Collins drily notes she attempted and found beyond her — he worked from existing translations. The person who actually decoded the original tablets, navigating Sumerian or Akkadian depending on the source text, is doing labour of a categorically different kind. Collins argues that translator deserves equal recognition. She is correct, and the silence around this is a recurring issue in the literary world's appetite for celebrity versions of ancient texts. Taken together, the two letters point at a single underlying problem: the Gilgamesh that reaches a general audience is always already a translation of a translation of an interpretation, and at each stage the original's strangeness gets smoothed into something familiar. The sacred becomes commercial. The profoundly companionate becomes legibly queer in a modern sense. The civilising erotic becomes exploitation. Every one of these smoothings is a loss — not a political loss but an intellectual one. The text becomes less interesting, not more. What Dawson and Collins are defending is the epistemological discipline of reading across cultural distance. That discipline requires holding open the possibility that a culture's categories were genuinely different from ours — not worse, not better, but structured differently. Mesopotamian culture had attitudes to sex, sanctity, and the relationship between human and divine that do not map cleanly onto either modern secular liberalism or Christian moral theology. A translation that erases that difference is not a translation. It is a conquest. The practical upshot for readers picking up Armitage's Gilgamesh — which by multiple accounts is vivid, muscular, and genuinely readable — is to hold the interpretive framing lightly. The verse itself may well earn its reputation. But 'translation' is doing work the word cannot honestly do, and 'sex worker' is a lens that flattens one of the most theologically charged figures in the earliest literature we have. Read Armitage. Then read Mitchell. Then, if curiosity takes you, read Andrew George's scholarly edition. The poem survives all three, and it is large enough to reward every approach that doesn't mistake its categories for our own.
