Translating Elvis into
Sumerian
Simo
Parpola
The following lines contain brief answers to
questions posed by a reporter of the Reuters news agency after the announcement
of Doctor Ammondt's plan to publish a Sumerian CD back in 1999. They are
reproduced here to satisfy the curiosity of others possibly asking similar
questions. Further information on Sumerian and the Sumerians can be found at
Ammondt's Sumerian CD, Three Songs in
Sumerian, was released during the course of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique
Internationale, Helsinki, in July 2001 by ViidheSallap Oy. Q: Why Sumerian? Is it hard to
translate modern lyrics into an ancient language? What were the
difficulties? What does Elvis sound
like in Sumerian? What do Elvis and Sumerian have in common? I understand that
Ammondt's first Elvis-in-Latin record was the brainchild of Professor Oksala.
Is Sumerian Elvis your idea, and if so how did it come to you? How has the idea
been received in the academic community? Or do you dare mention it? I know little about the Sumerian language but would
be interested in any background you could give me. The popular perception is
that it is the world's oldest language, though I have read that some
archeological findings show the world's oldest language may now be traced to
Egypt. Is it still fair to call it the world's oldest language? A: Why Sumerian? As far as I am concerned, mainly because it was both fun
and a challenge! I attended the occasion marking the release of Ammondt's Rocking in Latin a few years ago and,
impressed by the performance, asked him if he would be interested in going
still farther back in time and do Elvis in either Assyrian or Sumerian. (I had
earlier -- in 1995 -- collaborated with Reine Rimón and her Hot Papas in a
similar enterprise, adapting a Sumerian hymn to Inanna and an Assyrian elegy to
New Orleans Jazz, which succeeded quite well). He opted for Sumerian, and so it
started. I must admit translating Elvis into Sumerian was not
easy, but it was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot in the process.
The main difficulty was lexical: because of the great distance in time and
hence differences in culture -- Sumerian became extinct as a spoken language
about 1800 BC -- it was difficult to find Sumerian equivalents for certain
modern concepts and words. For example, the Sumerians of course didn't have
nylon socks, so I had to improvise and made it "cotton boots," šuhub gu. (I resolutely resisted the
temptation to take the easy road and use modern words as loan words in
Sumerian, which would have ruined the whole experiment). It took me some time
to solve this problem, because there does not exist a dictionary where you could
simply look these things up. The only modern dictionary of Sumerian, the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, ed. Å.
Sjöberg (Sumerian-English, not English-Sumerian!), has not yet advanced beyond
the letters A and B! As a language, Sumerian bears some resemblance to
English; most of the common words are mono- or bisyllabic, so there was no
great difficulty in translating the texts from the viewpoint of rhythm or
meter. Personally I think Elvis sounds quite nice and certainly quite
interesting in Sumerian. There are some problems regarding the pronunciation,
owing to the fact that Sumerian is a dead language. We know, for example, that
the vowel transliterated as 'u' stood for both [u] and [o], but it has not yet
been possible to determined when exactly it was pronounced [u] and when [o].
However, there are various ways of solving these problems (for example, the study of Sumerian loanwords in
Akkadian and vice versa, and the rendering of foreign names in Sumerian script)
and I personally believe we are not terribly far from the original pronunciation
in our reconstructions. Elvis would have fitted just fine in the Sumerian
society, for love songs and intoxicating music were important parts of the
enormously popular cult of the goddess Inanna. The news that Elvis is being translated into
Sumerian seems to have created some commotion among my colleagues. I am of
course looking forward with great amusement to their reactions after the
publication of the record. It will be fun. As for the antiquity of Sumerian, the first written
records in Sumerian (hundreds of administrative documents dealing with revenues
of temples and their distribution, written in pictographic script on clay
tablets) date from about 3200 BC and certainly they are the earliest specimens
of true writing known to date. The earliest specimens of Egyptian writing may
come close to the same date, but as there is clear evidence of strong Sumerian
cultural influence in predynastic Egypt, it is likely that the impulse that led
to the appearance of writing in Egypt came from Mesopotamia. Of course,
Sumerian was spoken in Mesopotamia (as Egyptian was spoken in Egypt) hundreds
if not thousands of years before the invention of writing.