The Epic of Utnoa

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The Epic of Utnoa (Esperanto: Poemo de Utnoa) is an epic by the Catalan writer Abel Montagut, published in Vienna, Austria, in 1993 and originally written in Esperanto.^{[1] [2]} It consists of seven cantos, and of 7095 verses in all, in an Alexandrine-derived Metre – a variant featuring 15 syllables rather than the usual 14.^[3] The songs are inspired by major epics from world literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Aeneid, the Bible, the Ramayana, the Iliad, and by modern authors such as Papini, Asimov and others – especially as far as the treatment of the primaeval flood is concerned.^[4][5] The book is contextualized by a foreword (by William Auld) and an afterword by Probal Dasgupta.^[6] William Auld called Poemo de Utnoa – “the first truly remarkable epic-science fiction poem in the world, and one of the very few modern epics” and Gerrit Berveling called it “impressively beautiful -- and at its most profound very wise – epic” ^[7]

Content[]

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It is already clear in the first canto that the history of human beings will be narrated in a symbolic mode; furthermore, the narration takes place from an outsider's viewpoint – it is an extraterrestrial population that visits Earth and studies the behavior of Terrans. The extraterrestrials inquire whether the Terrans deserve to be helped to avoid an impending disaster or whether it is better for the extraterrestrials to wait for the destruction to happen in order to be able, afterwards, to colonize the planet for their own use. The main debate concerns the question as to whether the Terrans are rational or not, given their inclinations towards vengeance, hatred and mass murder. The conclusion reached is that the extraterrestrials must warn at least one Terran that he should build a large ship to survive the flood: the extraterrestrial Emme conveys this warning to Utnoa, a character corresponding to the mythical figure Noah.

What follows, in the second canto, is the controversy between the two parties among the extraterrestrials. One of them has changed sides; he lived among the Terrans incognito for some time; his earth-born wife and son have been murdered. Now he and his supporters want this irrational species exterminated. On Earth, the rivalry between Babylon and Nineveh puts Utnoa in serious danger, for he is a nomad, caught in the cross-fire. Along with his brother Lashmu, he visits a Babylonian oracle to ask what the message communicated to Utnoa means. Meanwhile, the temple guards attached to the Ishtar Temple in Babylon (on the head priest's orders) launch a violent attack against the nomads; when Utnoa tells his people they need to build a ship, very few of them agree to do the work; most of them go off to fight the city-dwellers.

The third canto depicts various aspects of the life of the extraterrestrial Nayans, focusing on a special intellectual game, a wedding, and other everyday practices that manifest a highly developed and articulated standard of collective living. Meanwhile, on Earth, Utnoa's followers have begun to build the ship, with support from Shabda, queen of Ur, but in the face of opposition from the humiliated general Ulmi, angered by a coincidental hunting accident.

In the fourth canto, the extraterrestrials hostile to the Dilmunites (the nomads) hatch a conspiracy. Arunni feeds the prophetess Filge with thoughts against those building the ship. She passes them on to the queen, who ignores her, but what she says provokes general Ulmi even further. Afterward a deserter, Tudar, comes from the city to the shipbuilders and tells them, in detail, that the queen is dead and that there will be a major offensive against the Dilmunites very soon. In fact, even before he finishes telling them the whole story – in a filmlike sequence – General Ulmi, seeking revenge, launches the attack. Most of the shipbuilders are massacred: Lashmu, Utnoa's family, and others, including the deserter Tudar; and Ulmi, who led the offensive, is also killed.

The fifth canto features another assembly of the Gobans (the extraterrestrials are from the planet Goba, destroyed when their sun went nova). In order to compensate for the hostile action by Arunni, it is agreed that Utnoa – demoralized and relatively defenceless – should be encouraged by using a drug called anoŭdo. Inna visits Earth and administers it to Noah. Under the influence of the drug, he sees the poet Valmiki, who shows him the enormous achievements humankind will perform in future if he is able to save it; he travels from the Great Wall of China to the island of Sri Lanka; he then meets the Japanese painter Hokusai who proceeds to display other Asian wonders. Thus Utnoa is accompanied by two eminent guides per continent; for Europe, first Phidias and then Maria Sklodovska (also known as Marie Curie); for Africa, first Hypatia and then Sunjata Keita; and for America, first Frida Kahlo and then Neil Armstrong. On every continent, Utnoa contemplates the remarkable accomplishments, mainly but not exclusively architectural, which would render meaningful the heroic effort with his he is building the ark that is about to save human beings, who then be capable of the achievements that he is given an opportunity to visualize. His drug-induced travels through Oceania and Antarctica is quicker and unaccompanied. On his return, Utnoa leads the ceremonial mourning of his brother Lashmu – who had been supervising the shipbuilding work – and, to the reader's surprise, abandons the project and burns the partially built ship.

In the sixth canto, both the extraterrestrials supporting Noah's community and those who disapprove of him are surprised to see that even after his illuminating travels into the future Utnoa should have chosen to burn the ship and to withdraw into the wilderness with the few survivors who were with him. A small group of those Dilmunites who had not been present arrive. Jubal tells Utnoa about the battles waged by the other Dilmunites, who had left and joined forces with other nomadic tribes to besiege Nineveh. Negotiations for peace failed; the ruler of Nineveh took many prisoners, including Ukud, the chief of the Leonite tribe; he had Ukud tortured and murdered. Some Leonites wanted to take revenge at once, while some of their allies preferred to wait for others and join forces; they failed to resolve this controversy. When the Leonites left, there was a terrible battle between the citizens of Nineveh and the nomadic combatants. Given their unequal strength, the nomads were routed. The few Dilmunites who survived the massacre realized that it had been a mistake not to have agreed to take part in building the ship; they would like to reconsider. This was why Jubal came back in order to tell Utnoa and others what had happened.

The seventh canto ends the epic. The Dilmunites pick up the pieces and, in their camp, put their life back together as best they can. Noah gets engaged and marries; they receive what they take to be divine signals, which prompt them to start building the ship at the city of Eridu. The extraterrestrial Gobans react again: Jishka administers a drug to Utnoa, whose visions this time are guided by the extraterrestrial Roa Numu. He is now shown future evils that will come to pass if he does indeed rescue humankind – evils such as corruption, rapacity, drug dealing, organized crime, all the way to the bombing of Hiroshima as well as the environmental disaster and pollution associated with non-human causes. There are references to individualism, dictatorship and Nazism. After he comes out of the dream, Utnoa forgets the vision of future evils, which he attributes to some unconscious factors. The closing lines of the epic are open-ended: the impression is given that the ship will indeed be built. The reader already knows the Biblical legend and is spared an explicit repetition.

Style[]

The verses are of fifteen syllables, a rare format in modern poetry, but long verses go well with the epic genre and were used in several classical epics. The text pays frequent homage to those epics; for example, the second canto begins with the line "When rosy-fingered dawn ushered in the sun", invoking Homer's metaphor for dawn. In order to keep the archaic style from obstructing the reader, vivid comparisons (involving the dynamics of the animal kingdom) are added; these place the narration in an ecological context: Like a lion that ..., Like a rhinoceros that ... Probal Dasgupto in his afterword calls them ‘Abelian comparisons’ and studies their systematic use by Montagut.

The text also features occasional detailed explanations of the various elements of the whole, such as the attractions of the city of Babylon. The metrical structure that lends fluency to these descriptions also endows with a certain majesty the few epigrammatic expressions of conventional sentiments, such as Hazardo suverenas sur nia mondo drakone, ‘It is Chance that holds draconian sway over our world’.^[8]

Message[]

At the level of content, we must emphasize that this text recontextualizes the familiar myth of a primaeval flood with fabulations about life on other planets; such inventions typically flourish in writing that draws on pseudo-science and does not aim for serious literary goals; here, however, the memes serve the fictive-literary purposes of this particular epic.

Concerning ideology, the author uses every opportunity to show why these aliens in general and certain terrestrial humans in particular are committed to peaceful practices and the avoidance of violence. The aliens are of course shown using scientific progress in order to enjoy a high standard of living. The inventions that the aliens use reminds us of science fiction films. This text uses the extraterrestrial trope in order to communicate a contemporary message urging readers to aspire to a highly articulated, humane form of life. This is how Numu speaks, for instance:

"I am a rational being from a civilization far more advanced. We have resources at our disposal that you can’t imagine, and we are thus able to explore the universe at far more depth and gain insight"^[9]

The use of extraterrestrials is a trope that elicits the modern reader's complicity; its purpose is to take over the functions that divine interventions performed in the classical epics.

From the perspective of the Dilmunites (the nomadic tribe led by Utnoa), it makes sense to obey what they interpret as signals or messages from the gods. The modern reader understands that the sources of those signals or messages are most often the extraterrestrials, who are to be seen only as rational persons culturally advanced in comparison to the nomadic Dilmunites. Of course the Dilmunites are justified in attributing to their gods what we would call natural disasters; and we must bear in mind that the story turns on an impending natural disaster – a flood, in the terms that Terrans understand, caused by the approaching meteorite, which only the extraterrestrials can conceptualize.

The repeated references to the impending disaster are in keeping with the on the whole sombre mood of the text (especially in the seventh canto), a mood that reflects the modern reader's perception of Noah's predicament. In this connection, let us quote Numu Roa again – this is how he presents one part of the terrible images that Utnoa is shown:

"Here are those who will kill their own father, their mother, their wife, or even their own infants in their cradles. Look at those kidnappers, those who don’t balk at assaulting women and innocent children to satisfy that perverted lust of theirs. And these are the worst criminals that humankind will produce, they will kill other people as easily as they breathe in or out: feeling-blind mafiosi who should be buried in unremembered tombs without a name: it would have been better if no womb had ever given them birth"^[10]

The trope of exodus, on which Dilmunites are shown as having pinned their hopes, is associated with the non-violent inclination for peaceful coexistence of all communities and an aversion for military aggression and destructiveness. They believe that if they live in accordance with their non-violent principles, then they will reach the mythical promised land, Dilmun; this destination that the nomads long for is an island symbolically comparable to the realm to which Don Quixote promises to take Sancho if he behaves – the ínsula Bararataria – despite the considerable differences between the two texts.

References[]

Bibliography[]

• CAPPA,Giulio (ed.). La lingua fantastica, Keltia Editrice, Aosta, Italy, 1994, p. 265-275; ISBN 8886692072.
• MARTÍN RODRÍGUEZ, Mariano. «Dioses extraterrestres en la nueva epopeya. "La gesta d'Utnoa", de Abel Montagut, y la remitificación paeloastronáutica de Noé». [Alien gods in the new epics: Noah remythologised through the ancient astronaut hypothesis in Abel's Montagut's "La gesta d'Utnoa"] Amaltea: revista de mitocrítica 7, October 2015, p. 57-86. https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/AMAL/article/view/47672 --- https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_AMAL.2015.v7.47672
• McHALE, Brian (2009). “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry”. Narrative 17.1: 11-27. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256469/pdf
• PUIG, Eloi. “La Gesta d’Utnoa”. La Biblioteca del Kraken, n.p., 9 may 2008. https://www.elkraken.com/Esp/G-esp/R-Gesta-Utnoa-esp.html
• SUTTON, Geoffrey. Concise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto, 1887-2007. New York: Mondial, 2008, p. 553-557. ISBN 978-1-59569-090-6.
• TONKIN, H. (2012). “Esperanto Poetry”. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Roland Green et alii. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 457-58.
• VIANA, Paulo S. Poemo de Utnoa, Grava, sed ne sufiĉe legata [‘Important, but hasn’t found enough readers’], Esperanto, no. 1298, January 2016, p. 13.
• XI Festival de poesia de la Mediterrània. Teatre Principal de Palma, Ed. Produccions Estelroig (Sant Joan – Mallorca), 2009, p. 183-209, DL: PM 1.303-2009. https://docplayer.es/133659531-Xxi-festival-de-poesia-de-la-mediterrania.html