[DUSTCOVER] 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 masterpieces 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 1953 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.
AUTHOR STEPHEN MITCHELL, widely known for his ability to made ancient masterpieces thrillingly new, has also written Tae Te Ching, The Book of Job, The Gospel According to Jesus, The selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Bhagavad Gita, and Loving What Is (written with his wife Byron Katie).
About this version of Gilgamesh, Mitchell calls it a translation for many reasons. He doesn't read cuneiform and has no knowledge of Akkadian for judging textual meaning. Therefore, he depended on A. R. George's meticulous two-volume edition of the original text as well as profiting from the readings of other translations.
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| Wikipedia - the first is the tablet containing the story of the GREAT FLOOD, the second and third are the front and back and tablet V of 11 tablets relating the story of Gilgamesh |
In writing Gilgamesh, he grasped the story and then transformed his notes on the story to English verse, using a loose, non-iambic, non-alliterative tetrameter which is rare in English. Two examples of this meter in English verse that Mitchell is aware of are Eliot's Four Quartets and Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina". Mitchell endeavored to keep the rhythm from sounding too regular, varying lines so no two consecutive lines maintained the same rhythm.
BOOK 1 (opening stanza):
Surpassing all kings, powerful and tall
beyond all others, violent, splendid,
a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader,
hero in the front lines, beloved by his soldiers —
fortress they called him, protector of the people,
raging flood that destroys all defenses —
two-thirds divine and one-third human,
son of King Lugalbanda, who became
a god, and of the goddess Ninsun,
he opened the mountain passes, dug wells
on the slopes, crossed the vast ocean, sailed
to the rising sun, journeyed to the edge
of the world, in search of eternal life,
and once he found Utnapishtim — the man
who survived the Great Flood and was made immortal —
he brought back the ancient forgotten rites,
restoring the temples that the Flood had destroyed,
renewing the welfare of the people and the sacred land.
Who is like Gilgamesh? What other king
has inspired such awe? Who else can say,
"I alone rule, supreme among mankind"?
The goddess Aruru, mother of creation,
had designed his body, had made him the strongest
of men — huge, handsome, radiant, perfect.
Gilgamesh in a nutshell
The story is of King Gilgamesh who meets a man nearly as perfect as himself, a counter-self who balances out Gilgamesh's rapacious tendencies (despite being called perfect which he clearly wasn't), and the two great powerful men become the best of friends. Gilgamesh is tempered, but in his docility to his kingdom he still sought to conquer and still felt omnipotent. He convinces his powerful friend Enkidu to go on a journey to vanquish Humbaba, watcher of the Cedar Forest. They succeed but the price is Enkidu's slow and draining death of which Gilgamesh mourns violently, and then realizes his own mortality. So how his journey is to seek immortality, and his burning journey takes him onward.
Ultimately, he meets Utnapishtim, the man who along with his wife survived the Great Flood and was given immortality afterwards. Gilgamesh failed Utnapishtim's first test of finding immortality but he heard of another way, to dive deep into the ocean and procure a plant which would be "the antidote to the fear of death". But Gilgamesh, after nearly dying in procuring the plant, became timorous and decided to return to his kingdom and test the plant on one of his old men first, so he journeyed homeward. On the way he stopped to bathe at a pool and leaving the plant on the ground beside the pool where he bathed, the fragrance of the plant allured a snake to take it and "throw off its skin" (gain immortality). The plant was gone, Gilgamesh wept, and ... obviously died for the story ends with him returning and describing the timeless description of his glorious, magnificent and ancient city Uruk.
