Gilgamesh: A New English Version

From Publishers Weekly
The acclaimed translator of the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita now takes on the oldest book in the world. Inscribed on stone tablets a thousand years before the Iliad and the Bible and found in fragments, Gilgamesh describes the journey of the king of the city of Uruk in what is now Iraq.At the start, Gilgamesh is a young giant with gigantic wealth, power and beauty—and a boundless arrogance that leads him to oppress his people. As an answer to their pleas, the gods create Enkidu to be a double for Gilgamesh, a second self. Learning of this huge, wild man who runs with the animals, Gilgamesh dispatches a priestess to find him and tame him by seducing him. Making love with the priestess awakens Enkidu's consciousness of his true identity as a human being rather than as an animal. Enkidu is taken to the city and to Gilgamesh, who falls in love with him as a soul mate. Soon, however, Gilgamesh takes his beloved friend with him to the Cedar Forest to kill the guardian, the monster Humbaba, in defiance of the gods. Enkidu dies as a result. The overwhelming grief and fear of death that Gilgamesh suffers propels him on a quest for immortality that is as fast-paced and thrilling as a contemporary action film. In the end, Gilgamesh returns to his city. He does not become immortal in the way he thinks he wants to be, but he is able to embrace what is.Relying on existing translations (and in places where there are gaps, on his own imagination), Mitchell seeks language that is as swift and strong as the story itself. He conveys the evenhanded generosity of the original poet, who is as sympathetic toward women and monsters—and the whole range of human emotions and desires—as he is toward his heroes. This wonderful new version of the story of Gilgamesh shows how the story came to achieve literary immortality—not because it is a rare ancient artifact, but because reading it can make people in the here and now feel more completely alive. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
It's the world's first epic poem but was the last to be found. Inscribed on stone tablets in the Akkadian language, the epic Gilgamesh was buried during the fall of Nineveh, its language forgotten, not to be recovered and deciphered until the 19th century. In the excellent introduction to his new version, Stephen Mitchell tells the story of one of the epic's first translators, who was so excited when he realized that part of Gilgamesh anticipated the story of Noah's flood that he began running around the room and stripping off his clothes, shocking his Victorian colleagues. Since then, it has been translated many times, but most of the translations are intended for scholars and students. Mitchell, an American translator, and Derrek Hines, a British poet, independently decided it was time for a new version of the poem for the general reader, and both remind us why this 4000-year-old poem deserves to stand with other classic epics. I would love to claim this as the world's first novel, for it's nearly long enough and dramatizes the central concern of the novel: "The Gilgamesh Epic is a story about growing up," as a commentator once said, about moving from a state of innocence to one of experience and accepting the way things really are. It certainly has a novel's worth of action: Young King Gilgamesh of Uruk (modern-day Warka, in Iraq) is a royal hellraiser, mistreating his subjects so badly that they complain to the gods, who oblige by creating a wild man named Enkidu as a worthy rival and distraction. He and Gilgamesh become fast friends after a wrestling match -- this is a very macho work, despite the presence of several strong female characters -- and Enkidu's eventual death hits Gilgamesh hard. Wishing to avoid his own death, he goes in quest of the secret of immortality but fails in his attempt. Realizing that all his efforts have been in vain, Gilgamesh resigns himself to the inevitability of death and comes to see that the only true immortality is for work that endures: the walls of Uruk he has erected, or a work of art like Gilgamesh.Various portions of the epic were composed in the late third millennium B.C.E., then consolidated in the mid-second millennium by the scribe and incantation-priest Sîn-lëqi-unninni, whose version is the basis for most translations. Even that version is incomplete, however, so most translators have borrowed segments from earlier versions to make the narrative as coherent as possible. Mitchell has read all the English translations -- he admits he doesn't know Akkadian -- and has produced a very readable version in stately verse, printed in a beautiful format. Given the incomplete condition of the original, he has not hesitated to fill in some gaps, clarify images, delete repetitions and isolated fragments, and sometimes move lines around (all dutifully noted in his 80 pages of informative notes). Scholars and purists will object to these liberties; Mitchell is writing not for them but for the general reader who has always meant to read Gilgamesh but has been put off by the scholarly translations. As such, his version can be warmly recommended. He retains just enough of the strangeness of the original and its robust imagery to capture its essence, and by smoothing the fragments into a coherent narrative he highlights the work's essential themes: the necessary but painful progression from innocence to experience, the joys and sorrows of friendship, and the realization that personal fulfillment comes not in some mythical afterlife but here on Earth. As a wise woman tells our hero: "Humans are born, they live, then they die,/ this is the order that the gods have decreed./ But until the end comes, enjoy your life,/ spend it in happiness, not despair./ Savor your food, make each of your days/ a delight, bathe and anoint yourself,/ wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean, let music and dancing fill your house,/ love the child who holds you by the hand,/ and give your wife pleasure in your embrace./ That is the best way for a man to live." If Mitchell's Gilgamesh is intended for the beginner, Derrek Hines's version is for those who know the poem already and can delight in his postmodern makeover. Like Christopher Logue's startling adaptations of The Iliad, this version sounds like a rock band attacking a Bach concerto, with jarring but thrilling results. Here, for example, is how Hines describes the entrance of the Akkadian sex goddess:The incoming, high-velocity blip on the radar screenflips onto the sky, and cracks the sound barrier.Before him a Manhattan-high wall of glass airshatters, and reglazes behinda woman.For a moment blue's brakes fail:everything stammers sapphireuntil her eyes cool to human frequencies.She is ISHTAR . . . How cool is that? Hines obviously takes even more liberties with the original than Mitchell does, but his flamboyance and daring make this a delight to read. His version is as full of gods as Mitchell's (and Sîn-lëqi-unninni's), but secular affirmation triumphs: "For who needs the gods when you have poetry/ to exalt and redeem man in his fate -- / a liturgy without religion?" Reviewed by Steven Moore Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
Mitchell's version of Gilgamesh should be the standard for general and classroom readers for the foreseeable future. It includes everything in the Akkadian texts, though shorn of some fragmentary passages and emended by Mitchell for clarity (extensive endnotes flag every change Mitchell makes and provide literal translations wherever Mitchell feels such would further illuminate meaning and spirit). The prologue and the closing page, both of which advert to Gilgamesh's great city of Uruk, are cast in five-beat lines, with the story per se in 11 books of four-beat lines. Mitchell manages both meters masterfully, writing verse that is musical and propulsive for all its "free" characteristics. The 66-page introduction interprets the entire poem as a philosophical fable as well as an engaging, episodic story, and not without describing some of the prosodic devices of the ancient Babylonian poem. Mitchell understands the poem to be overarchingly concerned with self-discovery and acceptance, with appreciating that humans are mortal, hence less than the gods, but also capable of love, and thus greater than mere gods. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Elaine Pagels Harrington Professor of Religion, Princeton University Reading Stephen Mitchell's marvelously clear and vivid rendering makes me feel that I am encountering Gilgamesh for the first time.

Harold Bloom author of The Western Canon and The Book of J Stephen Mitchell's Gilgamesh is a wonderful version. It is as eloquent and nuanced as his translations of Rilke. This is certainly the best that I have seen in English.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Carved into 12 clay tablets more than 3,700 years ago, the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh has been called the oldest story in the world, the first literary classic, and the progenitor of all heroic tales. In poet Stephen Mitchell's new version, the story of the king of Uruk comes alive with a vibrancy that not even scholars will recognize.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Gilgamesh is considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, and although previously there have been competent scholarly translations of it, until now there has not been a version that is a superlative literary text in its own right. Acclaimed translator Stephen Mitchell's lithe, muscular rendering allows us to enter an ancient masterpiece as if for the first time, to see how startlingly beautiful, intelligent, and alive it is. His insightful introduction provides a historical, spiritual, and cultural context for this ancient epic, showing that Gilgamesh is more potent and fascinating than ever. 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.

SYNOPSIS

The hero is 16 feet tall. He is the king of Uruk, in the Iraq of about 2750 BCE, and he is a despot, running afoul of even the gods. The man who is his soul mate, lover and spouse is Enkidu, who was once wild and naked but was tamed by the erotic ministrations of a temple priestess. When their preemptive strike on a monster of evil results in the death of Enkidu, Gilgamesh's desperate mourning and search for a way to avoid a similar fate leads him to understand, at the end of the world, that the best way to find wisdom is not to look for it. Written 1000 years before the Iliad, this powerful epic was lost for nearly 2000 years until it was found on clay tablets in the ruins of Nineva. Mitchell's robust translation includes his notes on the text and its context, as well as a comprehensive glossary. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Steven Moore - The Washington Post

… [Mitchell's] version can be warmly recommended. He retains just enough of the strangeness of the original and its robust imagery to capture its essence, and by smoothing the fragments into a coherent narrative he highlights the work's essential themes: the necessary but painful progression from innocence to experience, the joys and sorrows of friendship, and the realization that personal fulfillment comes not in some mythical afterlife but here on Earth.

Joy Connolly - The New York Times

[Mitchell] believes literary greatness rests in what texts can teach us about ourselves, and he cracks open the lessons in ''Gilgamesh'' by rebuilding its clay fragments into a poem easy on the eyes and the transcultural imagination. Gone are the brackets and dots that signify the presence of gaps and disputed interpretations in the sources. When he can, Mitchell spackles the standard Akkadian version with verses in other languages, from other traditions; when none are available, he supplies his own. The result is a quintessentially American version of the ancient Mesopotamian narrative -- vibrant, earnest, unfussily accessible -- whose moments of red-blooded splendor stand in contrast to stretches of bland sentimentality.

Publishers Weekly

The acclaimed translator of the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita now takes on the oldest book in the world. Inscribed on stone tablets a thousand years before the Iliad and the Bible and found in fragments, Gilgamesh describes the journey of the king of the city of Uruk in what is now Iraq. At the start, Gilgamesh is a young giant with gigantic wealth, power and beauty-and a boundless arrogance that leads him to oppress his people. As an answer to their pleas, the gods create Enkidu to be a double for Gilgamesh, a second self. Learning of this huge, wild man who runs with the animals, Gilgamesh dispatches a priestess to find him and tame him by seducing him. Making love with the priestess awakens Enkidu's consciousness of his true identity as a human being rather than as an animal. Enkidu is taken to the city and to Gilgamesh, who falls in love with him as a soul mate. Soon, however, Gilgamesh takes his beloved friend with him to the Cedar Forest to kill the guardian, the monster Humbaba, in defiance of the gods. Enkidu dies as a result. The overwhelming grief and fear of death that Gilgamesh suffers propels him on a quest for immortality that is as fast-paced and thrilling as a contemporary action film. In the end, Gilgamesh returns to his city. He does not become immortal in the way he thinks he wants to be, but he is able to embrace what is. Relying on existing translations (and in places where there are gaps, on his own imagination), Mitchell seeks language that is as swift and strong as the story itself. He conveys the evenhanded generosity of the original poet, who is as sympathetic toward women and monsters-and the whole range of human emotions and desires-as he is toward his heroes. This wonderful new version of the story of Gilgamesh shows how the story came to achieve literary immortality-not because it is a rare ancient artifact, but because reading it can make people in the here and now feel more completely alive. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The moving tale of a king who mourns the death of his closest friend and consequently undertakes a journey to discover the secrets of immortality, Gilgamesh has been in existence for thousands of years but was not discovered and translated until the 19th century. Written in Akkadian and Sumerian, the surviving texts have been translated many times, sometimes in literal versions and other times in sparer, more dramatic renderings. Prolific translator Mitchell uses various versions of the tale to achieve a fuller and more free-flowing adaptation. In his extensive notes, he indicates where he adds, transfers, or omits lines in order to create an exciting narrative. In the introduction, he parallels Gilgamesh's ill-fated journey to kill a dragon with George W. Bush's war in Iraq, but he does not belabor the point, which is just as well. The reader will want to read the long introduction after the poem, as too much of the plot is revealed there. Recommended for all larger public and undergraduate academic libraries, especially those that do not have the definitive (and expensive) two-volume Oxford edition edited by A.R. George. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/04.]-Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology Lib., CUNY, Brooklyn Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Harold Bloom

Stephen Mitchell's Gilgamesh is a wonderful version. It is as eloquent and nuanced as his translations of Rilke. This is certainly the best that I have seen in English. — author of The Western Canon and The Book of J

Robert Coles

Here is the wisdom and lyrical beauty of yore rendered, offered us anew, by a distinguished, ever-so-knowing translator and poet who has given so many of us a wondrous education these past years. Mitchell connects us to treasures of the past brought alive by his broad and deep sensibility. — author of Lives of Moral Leadership, The Call of Service, and The Spiritual Life of Children and James Agee Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University

Peter Matthiessen

Stephen Mitchell's fresh new rendition of mankind's oldest recorded myth is quite wonderful in its limpidity and the immediacy of its live emotions. — author of The Snow Leopard and At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Elaine Pagels