Gilgamesh: A New English Version

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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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 screen
flips onto the sky, and cracks the sound barrier.
Before him a Manhattan-high wall of glass air
shatters, and reglazes behind
a woman.For a moment blue's brakes fail:everything stammers sapphire
until 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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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