'Everyman,' with other interludes, including eight miracle playsDownload Now...
| Text Source: |  |
| Description: | Not available |
| Table of Contents: | Not available |
Amazon.com
This edition provides a prose rendering of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the cycle of poems preserved on clay tablets surviving from ancient Mesopotamia of the third mi llennium B.C. One of the best and most important pieces of epic poetry from human history, predating even Homer's Iliad by roughly 1,500 years, the Gilgamesh epic tells of the various adventures of that hero-king, including his quest for immortality, and an account of a great flood similar in many details to the Old Testament's story of Noah. The translator also provides an interesting and useful introduction explaining much about the historical context of the poem and the archeological discovery of th e tablets.
Customer Review: It was horrible.
I had to read it for a summer reading book. It was horrible. I mean, who wants to read all about the Ancient Sumarians?
Customer Review: Yet another Gilgamesh.
I was reading these thirty-some reviews of The Epic of Gilgamesh, starting the old Sanders one in prose, which isn't half bad. Almost none of translations and/or reditions (translation made from other translations, rather than from the original Akkadian in cuneiform alphabet)...none are really bad, but you certainly can get different slants on the story, and twisted episodes, and missed tone, and so on.
The scholarly translations by Assyriologists (A.George, Foster, Kovacs, Dalley, and so on) are usually too scholarly, and interrupt the read with all the problems that still abound. (Almost a third of the epic is still missing, for example.) The renditions, poets and wanna-be's like Jackson and Ferry, tend to wander off into their own thing; John Gardner (Grendel) included: he's sexy, but he ain't Sin-leqi-unnini (the supposed 'Homer' of the version found in an ancient library in 600 BC). Stephen Mitchell, a great Rilke translator, doesn't let on that he doesn't really read the Akkadian, so that's a rendition without your knowing whose versions he worked from. There's a lot of fudging going on in the Gilgamesh racket. It's a whole sub-story to the epic itself, and almost as much fun.
But if you wanted to get as close to the original text as possible, dig up the 1948 translation by Alexander Heidel (whose text seems sympathetically ancient: the book's typeface makes it look like a dissertation from that era, font by Underwood). But Heidel is closest to what the original sounds like: The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parellels: "A translation and interpretation of the Gilgamesh Epic and related Babylonian and Assyrian documents."
But really everyone named above, and maybe three times that many in print today, all take it beyond Heidel's crude (albeit with an ancient beauty, almost like an artifact) level, but I think they all err, in going too far, or not far enough, or getting too far from the original, or just keeping a good read going. The politics of getting to the original tablets, by the bye, and the technology of reading the ancient clay fragments covered in cuneiform script three to four thousand years old, is a worthwhile epic in itself. There are 'Gilgamesh wars' out there that you'll never hear about, having to do with careers, withheld translations, transcriptions, etc. And why not, the stakes aren't really that small: this is the very first of work of literature, predating Homer by a thousand years and much longer if you look at earlier versions, the Old Babylonian and the Sumerian mess. Why indeed not lock in the 'definitive translation'?
But enough of human ambition; one final suggestion: if you want to read a version that stays quite close to the original, whatever that is/was, but brings the sensory dimension up to modern taste, and teases out a good deal of the humor that's arguably in the original but which most translations miss, then I'm pleased to inform you that there is yet one more Gilgamesh cropping up in of all places, at Lulu dot com, as a graphic novel. The cartoonist has added his own humor--it feels like/looks like it's for 14 year olds some of the time--but he's also brought out the intrinsic humor of the original, has certainly rendered the scenes vividly, keeps his own contribution distinct from 'the original', and the text for the pure epic reads as well as the best ones above and keeps the reader forefront, not the scholarship. Check it out at Lulu.
Qualifier: It's not finished, but two out of three installments are there, through about Tablet IX (a total of 12), where Enkidu falls sick and then Gilgamesh sets out bereft and alone on his quest for immortality, learning lots of secrets as he goes, including that of the story of the Flood. This is Noah's arc, but written down some one to two millenium before Genesis. When one George Smith first cracked the code, in the 1872, there were riots. It was Darwin all over again, to the literalists of faith, of which there were then as now, many.
A neat new book (2006) on all that is out, listed here in amazon: David Damrosch's The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh.
Back to the graphic version:
A comic book reviewer, former editor at DC Comics, one 'Occasional Superheroine,' begins a pretty favorable revew with something like: Ancient Sumeria meets Krum... This is about right: the epic bleeds through in all its strength and Sumerian-Babylonian wonder and feeling, and the cartoons provide a tongue-in-cheek commentary that's much more sophisticated than it at first appears, with its Ally-Oop hero and his hirsute side-kick. The Bull of Heaven, the giant monster Humbaba, Shamhat and Enkidu out there on the steppes unchaperoned, spoiled little vindictive Ishtar... it's really worth a gander.
Curious note: the artist and writer seem to be brothers, or a father-son team. And in the interest of Full Disclosure, one of them's me!
Occasional Superheroine recommends it; so do I.
~"Sam"
Customer Review: the beggining
Almost five thousand years ago. It is unthinkable. To comprehend that ancient time, one would need knowledge and power of imagination that would be no easy to measure or value. Even than, one couldn't possibly be any nearer that time. It is shrouded in mystery.
Origins of entire history of literature, of written words/worlds, emerge from these tablets. And here we find first (written) quest for immortality. And tragedy which is found in fact that that quest cannot ever be successful. That man is forever compelled to roam that vast universe of his, and to raise his voice in vain, constantly fighting for something that is as far away as things can be.
Gilgamesh is a real beaut. Of it's style, importnace, structure numerous books have been written. But those are reserved for scholars and for those of you out there who are burning with desire to know. Gilgamesh greatness lies in a simple fact. It lies in realising that it doesn't matter how far have we gone in comprehending world around us, or how much we advanced technologically. However far we may have traveled, when facing this book, we learned that we are still troubled, and still defined by the same troubles heroes of old had been. What does that teach us? You'll have to answer that one for yourself.
Of this translation I don't know nothing. I haven't actually read it. My comment concernes Gilgames corpus itself. Sorry 'bout that :)
Customer Review: Outstanding presentation of a world treasure
N. K. Sandars' presentation of Gilgamesh is an outstanding achievement of editing, interpretation, and paraphrase. "Paraphrase" rather than translation, because she admits that she is unable to read the cuneiform in which the epic was written over four thousand years ago; instead she's compared all the literal scholarly editions available and turned them into very readable and moving English prose. This was easily the finest version for the nonspecialist reader when it was published in 1960, and to my mind it remains unsurpassed.
Readers primarily interested in the cultural background of Gilgamesh will want to look at more recent scholarship, but for the rest of us Sandars's rendition of the text is as powerfully engaging as when it first appeared.
Though tyhe original Gilgamesh is a verse epic, and Sandars writes prose, readers looking for the intensity of poetry will find it here, in what's really a splendid "prose poem." In fact, Sandars's prose strikes me as more, not less, satisfying than David Ferry's currently popular verse translation, which is competent but, to my mind, rather lackluster.
Although Penguin has issued a newer translation in verse by Andrew George, I hope they keep N. K. Sandars's version in print. It's brilliantly done.
Customer Review: The origins of civilization
This poem is perhaps the oldest "book" known so far. It is supposed to have been first conceived by the end of the Third Millenium B.C. It tells, in a direct and somewhat naive way, the adventures of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, in Mesopotamia. In the beginning we are told of how Gilgamesh got to be king, and how he felt lonely, since he lacked a friend worthy of him. The gods listen to him, and tell him to send a whore to seduce Enkidu, a savage man who lives with the beasts and behaves as such. He is the "good savage", totally in a natural state and without a civilizatory stain. It is chilling to think of this particular story as an ancient memory of our life in pre-civilization times. The prostitute manages to seduce him (any resemblance to Adam and Eve is granted), and then the beasts reject him. He has become fully human. This passage is a wonderful metaphore of the civilizatory process which we humans experienced in immemorial ages. Enkidu has to learn to drink milk from a jar and not directly from the breasts of animals. He has to learn to wear clothes, drink wine and sleep on a bed.
Enkidu fights Gilgamesh, showing him his strength and courage, which makes him the inseparable friend. After that, Gilgamesh feels the urgency to leave his legacy in this world before his inevitable death, another humanizing feature, since the individual already shows a full conscience of his mortality and of himself, and thinks of the future. So, both friends depart for the Woods, presumably current Lebanon (the Cedar Forest), where Ancient Mesopotamians got their timber, so scarce in their country. To conquer the Woods, they must kill the giant Humbaba, guardian of the forest, incarnation of Evil and presumably the first reference to the Devil in literature. In doing so they infuriate all the gods except one, and one of them must die. This is how Enkidu gets sick and dies after an excruciating agony. This fact turns out to be devastating for Gilgamesh, because it confirms the inevitability of his own demise. Ravaged by his friend's death, Gilgamesh sets out on a journey to try and find a way to escape from mortality. He travels to the East, beyond the mountains, to the Country of Sun, to try to cross the Sea and reach the land of Dilmun (kind of a preserved Garden of Eden), where Utnapishtim lives, the only human to have survived the Flood (it raises your hair to see a reference to this cataclism, centuries before the Bible), and consequently granted immortality by the gods. Gilgamesh reaches the "garden by the sea" where a young female vineyard tender lives. She tells him frankly that he will never find what he's looking for, since Death is unavoidable. It is humans' Fate, but to humans it has also been granted the possibility of happiness, and so the girl advises him to "fill your belly with good things... have fun and rejoice. Wear clean clothes, bathe in fresh water, caress yout little cildren and embrace and make your woman happy", for that is also the Fate of Man. Gilgamesh can't give up and convinces the oarsman to take him to Dilmun. Utnapishtim, puzzled, receives him and tells him he'll live forever if he stays awake six days and seven nights. Of course he can't make it, and when he wakes up Utnapishtim tells him the story of the Flood, suprisingly and suspiciously similar to that told later in the hebrew Genesis (let's not forget the long years of Hebrew exile in Babilonia). Gilgamesh makes a final effort, ripping from the bottom of the sea the "plant that gives you your youth back" but later, while bathing in a well, a snake steals the plant, changes skin and leaves. Unconsoled, Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and dies.
It is difficult to exaggerate the historical and literary importance of this work, since in its brief span it collects all that makes us human: civilization, glory, the conscience of Death. It also gathers primeval memories, the process of going out of the African plains and building cities, the search for supplies and the fear of the beasts of the forests. The tale of the Flood confirms for us the memory of cosmic catastrophes which since the remote past left an indelible mark upon us. Indispensable reading.
Book Categories:
Books / Subjects / Literature & Fiction / General / Classics
Books / Subjects / Literature & Fiction / Poetry / Anthologies
Books / Subjects / Literature & Fiction / Poetry / Epic
Books / Subjects / Literature & Fiction / Poetry / Ancient, Classical & Medieval
Books / Subjects / Literature & Fiction / World Literature / Mythology / Gilgamesh
Books / Subjects / Religion & Spirituality / General
Books / Specialty Stores / Trip / Look Inside Fiction Books
Books / Specialty Stores / Trip / Look Inside Religion & Spirituality Books
|
Pick of the Day
Lists of Interest
Modern Library 100 Best Novels:
In 1998, Modern Library picked the top 100 Novels of the century. This list contains all of the bo
...
Webmaster's Favourites:
These are my selections, humbly presented as books that I particularly enjoyed.
Other ways of browsing
|
