La versione accadica del LUGAL-E: La tecnica babilonese della traduzione dal Sumerico e le sue 'regole'.

• Author: Foster, Benjamin R.
• Position: Book Review

By STEFANO SEMINARA. Materiali per il vocabulario sumerico, vol. 8. Rome: DIPARTIMENTO DI STUDI ORIENTALI, UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA "LA SAPIENZA," 2001. Pp. 595.

This substantial monograph is a detailed study of the Akkadian translation of the Sumerian poem Lugal-e. Seminara notes that, with few exceptions, Assyriologists have not studied Akkadian translations in Sumero-Akkadian bilinguals as topics in and of themselves, but have mainly used them for support of a modern translation of the Sumerian, to fill in gaps in the Sumerian, or ignored or pilloried them when they seemed different from the Sumerian. Seminara is interested in the history of translation and translation theory, suggesting that in Western tradition translation tends to be held in low esteem and deemed inferior to the source text. In Mesopotamia, he proposes, translation served quite a different purpose than the use made of it by Assyriologists. He sees translation as a mirror image of the source text in a culture which recognized two languages as "translatable" (in modern terms), or having accepted sets of correspondences. The translation of Lugal-e was not, he argues, prepared to assist readers who did not understand Sumerian; rather, it had an analytic or explanatory purpose for people who already understood the Sumerian. Seminara separates the unilingual version of Lugal-e from the bilingual versions and shows that the Akkadian translation follows the unilingual more closely. Indeed, the Sumerian of the bilingual version shows evidence of direct and indirect influence from the Akkadian translation or the Akkadian speech habits of the scribes who transmitted it. The Akkadian version has a more stable text than the bilingual Sumerian, and, according to Seminara, must initially have been transmitted separately from the unilingual Sumerian, in written or oral form, before being combined with the bilingual Sumerian version. In a detailed running commentary on the Akkadian translation of the poem, Seminara probes the techniques behind the Akkadian translation: addition, subtraction, and alteration of text. He assesses variants with great care, hoping to isolate those that resulted from choices made during the translation process rather than being simply characteristic of texts transmitted over many centuries. He is also interested in the sources of the translation and discusses to what extent the lexical tradition might have provided equivalences and to what extent...