Gilgamesh [Paperback]

Derrek Hines (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 19, 2004

In his thrillingly contemporary retelling of the world’s oldest epic, award-winning poet Derrek Hines brings us as close as we may ever come to re-creating the power it had over its original listeners more than four thousand years ago in the ancient Near East.

Gilgamesh, the semi-divine ruler of Uruk, is a larger-than-life bully and abuser of his people. In order to tame the arrogant king, the gods create the wild and handsome Enkidu. But after Enkidu and Gilgamesh become fast friends, they defy the gods in a series of outsized adventures that brings Gilgamesh face to face with both loss and death itself. Hines energizes this timeless tale with vivid and electrifyingly modern images, from the goddess Ishtar cracking the sound barrier, to a battlefield nightmare of spectral snipers and exploding hand grenades, to the CAT-scan image of a dying friend. The themes of love and friendship, grief, despair, and hope had their first great expression in this story, and this dazzling new interpretation brings us into its thrall again.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

What are paparazzi, CAT scans, hyperspace, and jelly roll doing in the world's oldest literary story? Nothing good, some may feel, especially if they don't take seriously Hines' stated intent "to recapture for the modern reader some of the vigor and excitement the original audience must have felt" for the third-millennium B.C.E. tale of the giant Gilgamesh, his friend Enkidu, their exploits, Enkidu's death, and Gilgamesh's quest for immortality and subsequent resignation to human limitations. For Hines, giving the story renewed impact means a total rewrite in punchy free verse that incorporates dialect passages and the odd neologism as well as modern jargon. The results are racy, flippant, and sometimes perverse, as when Hines completely elides the old poem's thousand-years-before-Genesis account of a worldwide flood. Apparently the flood episode grants more power to the gods than Hines can stomach, at least if he shares the opinion he gives the dying Enkidu: that his and Gilgamesh's story proves, however imperfectly, "that we are the gods." This is Gilgamesh for the New Age. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“A vibrant and vigorous reimagining of the world’s first book, which should take its place alongside Heaney’s Beowulf and Hughes’s Ovid on the shelf of revivified classics.” —The New Statesman


“A brilliant version of an ancient tale; replete with humour, pathos, drama, and much more." –The Telegraph



"Derrek Hines makes Gilgamesh exciting." –The Guardian

"Hines's distinctive mode–part surreal, part cinematic–combines the concentration of lyric poetry with the narrative compulsion and fluency of an adventure story." –Times Literary Supplement

"Hines's energetic metaphors and nimble wit revivify the thrill of a very old tale."

–Times (London)


“An evocative lyric journey through the Mesopotamian story, glittering with Hines’ own fresh images.” —The Financial Times

“A sparkling poetic vision.” —The Oxford Times

“Impressive, consistent . . . packed with good things.” —Christopher Logue

“I read this version with great interest and admiration. It has real energy and drive with some splendidly interesting images. I was held throughout.” —Ian Hamilton

“A superb achievement. The cinematic swoops, that terrific, loss-haunted elegy, absolutely packed with reverberating phrases. . . . It is not only a rendering of the poem but a brilliant, vital contemporary commentary on it.” —Paul Newman, editor, Abraxis

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; First edition (October 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400077338
• ISBN-13: 978-1400077335
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.2 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,780,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #47 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Epic

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Really Gilgamesh, December 21, 2004

By 

Frank Perry (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Gilgamesh (Paperback)

I bought this Gilgamesh along with the new rendition by Stephen Mitchell. Of the two, I would highly recommend that the potential reader buy the Mitchell version.

My problem with this lusty, powerfully written and masculine poem, is that it is not Gilgamesh. The poet has been so free in rendering Gilgamesh into modern English that the epic story is almost completely lost. I would rate it higher if it had a different title with something like "A New Poem Loosely Based on the Ancient Epic"... something like that. And very loosely at that! Kind of like "Truth-in-Lending".

The reader who is new to Gilgamesh will be totally baffled by this ancient classic if the Hines version is the one he or she buys. I think that the reader who is well acquainted with this nearly 5,000-year-old epic might very well find new delights in Derrek Hines's poem. But again, it just isn't Gilgamesh and should be sold as something else.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I agree with Frank Perry, January 25, 2005

By 

E. Moure (Montreal Quebec) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gilgamesh (Paperback)

Just wanted to second the review above... this Gilgamesh is kind of the hip boy in tight levis version, it has its charms but is not Gilgamesh... and definitely doesnt take its place alongside Heaney's Beowulf... I recommend the Mitchell translation... though I have to say, I have a fond spot for the NK Sandars in the Penguin Classics, coz its the first one I read and I have chunks of it in memory...

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Christopher Logue-esque reworking of Gilgamesh, November 10, 2008

By 

Joe Kenney "buttergun" (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gilgamesh (Paperback)

Derrek Hines does to Gilgamesh what Christopher Logue does to the Iliad in "War Music;" he's rewritten the epic from ground-up in contemporary English verse. The back cover of this edition of Gilgamesh namedrops Ted Hughes's "Tales from Ovid" and Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf" as points of comparison - but those two books were actual translations. Hines's Gilgamesh is not, and neither is Logue's "War Music." The reason Logue isn't mentioned, I assume, is because whole swathes of Hines's Gilgamesh come off like "War Music, Part Two." I mean, it's more Logue than Logue in parts, with its postmodern spin on ancient epic. Here's how Hines writes the intro of the goddess Ishtar, as she descends upon Gilgamesh:

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 . . .

So Logue is a huge influence here. And though Hines proves himself a fine poet, there is one element where Logue is his superior: Logue remembers to craft a narrative. Hines instead relays the story of Gilgamesh in hindsight, spending more time on extended soliloquies on life and death. The battle with Humbaba for example is here relayed via the POV of an anonymous soldier, complete with high-tech metaphors of the battle. But as for Gilgamesh's actual battle with Humbaba? It's dashed off in four lines - beginning, middle, and end. Gilgamesh's quest for immortality is given even shorter shrift; he gains and loses the "Herb of Immortality" in one single line.

It's for these reasons that, as others have stated, this version of Gilgamesh should not serve as one's entry point into the epic. This is certainly written for those who have read more faithful translations of Gilgamesh and are now ready for a snazzier take on it. My only regret is that Hines doesn't spend more time letting the tale unfold. He speeds through every memorable scene - Gilgamesh and Enkidu's first meeting, their battles, Ishtar's proposal to Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh's denial of her, the battle with the Taurus constellation, Enkidu's death, the whole goshdarn STORY, basically - broaching and dismissing them in the blink of an eye. That being said, this book is filled to the brim with poetic moments. Take this fantastic insight:

For who needs the gods when you have poetry
to exalt and redeem man in his fate -
a liturgy without religion?

And here is Gilgamesh's recount of his (all-too-briefly told) trip to the Underworld:

"And of the Underworld, well,
grim it was, but I've seen more terrifying places
in a lover's eyes."

So even if it isn't as jawdropping as Logue's "War Music" or as flawless as Hughes's "Tales from Ovid," this "account" of Gilgamesh at least reaches for the same heights - and sometimes manages to snatch hold.