Gilgamesh: A New English Version

Gilgamesh dates from as early as 1700 BCE -- a thousand years before the Iliad. Lost for almost two millennia, the eleven clay tablets on which the epic was inscribed were discovered in 1853 in the ruins of Nineveh, and the text was not deciphered and fully translated until the end of the century. When the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke first read Gilgamesh in 1916, he was awestruck. "Gilgamesh is stupendous," he wrote. "I consider it to be among the greatest things that can happen to a person."

The epic is the story of literature's first hero -- the king of Uruk in what is present-day Iraq -- and his journey of self-discovery. Along the way, Gilgamesh discovers that friendship can bring peace to a whole city, that a preemptive attack on a monster can have dire consequences, and that wisdom can be found only when the quest for it is abandoned. In giving voice to grief and the fear of death -- perhaps more powerfully than any book written after it -- in portraying love and vulnerability and the ego's hopeless striving for immortality, the epic has become a personal testimony for millions of readers in dozens of languages.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Gilgamesh, 2008-06-23
Well written book describing the epic and its origins and then a very readable epic poem based on compilations from leading translators...very smooth and fun to read.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Beautiful, 2008-05-22
If you've never read "Gilgamesh" in your life...read it! It is a fascinating, satisfying epic. Among other things:

1.) It is a well-written interesting story.
2.) It show the dangers of neglecting the present world for the sake of wild goose chases.
3.) It shows how a seemingly heroic conquest can end in disaster.

In addition to all that, Stephen Mitchell's translation is beautiful and his introduction is lucid and insightful. Highly recommended.


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Man's life is short, 2008-05-20
This is, without any doubt, a controversial translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of the love between the arrogant tyrant, Gilgamesh, and the wild man, Enkidu. After Enkidu's death Gilgamesh searches desperately how to overcome death, how to realize the impossible human dream of eternal life. But, `when the gods created mankind, they also created death, and held back eternal life for themselves alone.'
Instead of acting `as though human life lasted forever' ('Building houses, make contracts, brothers divide their inheritance, conflicts occur'), man should face head-on the fact that life is short and `carpe diem': `Gilgamesh, can't you see how fortunate you are? You have worn yourself out through ceaseless striving ... and what have you achieved but to bring yourself one day nearer to the end of your days?'

Is this text a literal translation? No. Is it a correct translation? No, already the sometimes long repetitions are not included, so no `bis repetita placent'. Is it a fair rendering of an original version? No. Is it a fair rendering of the original epic by using different versions? Yes.
So, this is not a text for scholars or students (for them I recommend A.R. George's `The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic'), but for the layman interested in world literature and its first masterpiece. Sîn-leqi-unninni wrote indeed a monumentally human poem, worth a Homeros.
A must read.



0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Gilgamesh: A New English Version, 2008-01-14
Just what I was looking for, one of the countries in the Holy Bible.


5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

A non-specialist's humble opinion: stop browsing and read this version!, 2008-01-06
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic work of humankind, a tale rich in adventure, sensuality, and psychological depth and complexity. The narrator reaches out and grabs the reader immediately by inviting him or her to look around the mighty city of Uruk, to observe its walls, temples, and gardens (in our mind's eye, if nothing else)--all the works of the man-god Gilgamesh. Yet, our picture of Gilgamesh quickly becomes rather complex--we see him first as a mighty hero, then we see that he is both loved and feared by his subjects, as he fully exercises his sovereign powers. Gilgamesh tames Enkidu, his wild brother in arms, in a rather unorthodox way but in the end we see it is Enkidu who civilizes and humanizes Gilgamesh, who is forced to face his own mortality. Long after the Sumerian civilization ceased to exist and the grand city of Uruk disappeared beneath the sands, through this tale Gilgamesh lives on in the human consciousness--ironically, granting him the immortality he so desperately sought.

When I set out to read the Epic of Gilgamesh, I learned that reading *THE* Epic of Gilgamesh is an impossible task--it doesn't exist! As a tale that is perhaps more than 4000 years old and likely started as a story told orally, it has been passed down in a number of versions in various levels of completeness, in a number of different languages, over a span of several millennia. When I browsed the reviews here on Amazon, I ran across a number of comments disparaging this "version" on a variety of points--the author does not speak the original languages of the tale (Sumerian, Akkadian, etc.), he has "filled in blanks" and moved around pieces of the text, etc. Some reviewers have mentioned that "truer" and "more scholarly" versions exist, but given the extremely wide and indeterminate origins of this tale mentioned above, those claims seem about valid as someone claiming to have the "true" recipe for chicken soup. What exactly does that mean, after all?

I imagine a comment like that will send a few scholars into apoplexy (if the title of my review did not already), but being an academic myself (albeit in a very different field) I feel it is important to add a healthy dose of skepticism to these claims of the existence of an "original" or "true" story lest one think they are being cheated out of the "real deal" by reading a version such as this one. Likewise, as a speaker and translator of foreign languages myself, I understand the delicate balance (some might call it a trade-off) between staying faithful to the letter versus the spirit of the text--in other words, translation is as much art as it is science. The versions full of brackets and ellipses might be technically accurate, so-called "scholarly" translations of a given intermediate version (such as Sin-leqi-unninni's) or two, but at the same time it is not a faithful recreation of the experience of a Sumerian hearing the tale for the first time. Technical accuracy is easier to quantify than the aesthetic appeal of a given version or translation, but that does not mean that aesthetics are not important--especially for the non-specialist (which I would imagine includes the majority of Amazon shoppers).

To that end, I highly recommend Mitchell's version as it gives the best of both worlds. Through copious notes, Mitchell cites where he varies from the older texts and translations so that one may track and compare versions. Meanwhile, he has crafted English verse that cleanly and clearly tells the tale of Gilgamesh better than any "scholarly" or other "non-scholarly" version that I have laid eyes on. His detailed introduction helps set a context for the text, its discovery, its relationship to other texts (such as epics in other traditions, and the tale's similarities with the story of the Biblical flood), and its relevance today.

If you are interested in more technically accurate versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh (such as more conventional translations of Sin-leqi-unninni's "standard" version) then by all means explore other versions recommended by the reviewers much more knowledgeable than me in this area. But for people like me--the non-specialist more interested in reading the epic (with a lower-case "e") of Gilgamesh than chasing after the phantom "original" or "true" Epic of Gilgamesh--save yourself the trouble of thumbing through different versions and pick this one up.

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