Customer Reviews

Gilgamesh: A New English Version

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In general, I am more interested in the scholarly translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh than I am those that attempt to create an English literary version of the Epic. That being said, Stephen Mitchell's new version of the Epic is a very readable adaptation, even if he takes a lot of liberties with the original story. Mr. Mitchell draws from several different translations, including Stephanie Dalley's and Benjamin Foster's, both of which I have read and can recommend to others as very good literal translations. He also uses Andrew George's "The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic" which has been highly recommended to me, and which I look forward to reading.

In his efforts to produce a more literary version of the Epic, parts of it have been cut or rearranged, so if you are looking for a pure translation, this is not only not a good choice but it would be one of the worst selections you could make. However, if you are looking for an enjoyable and easy to follow version of the Epic, this is a nice introduction. I would not suggest that you read only this edition though, but rather use it as a starting place to get a feel for the story and then move on to the other translations, which while more difficult to follow are ultimately more rewarding.

I have heard the Gilgamesh title bandied about in conversations over the years, but I never had any interest in reading the epic that carries the historical king's name until Stephen Mitchell's translation came along. Call it fate, downtime between freelance jobs or an intriguing cover that happened to feed into my backburnered fascination with the Ancient Near East. In any event, I purchased the book and have just now finished reading it.

One of my biggest obstacles in approaching ancient literature is language. I want to be able to read it in a modern-enough translation that I don't lose the rhythm of the writing. Nothing destroys my interest in finishing a book more than constantly having to flip to a rear glossary or bouncing down to incessant footnotes. Mitchell's translation avoids all of that clutter by telling the story in a vernacular that facilitates finishing the work within a single sitting.

There are ample endnotes that delve into the issue of language translation if that floats one's boat, but there is also a wonderful (and timely) introduction that sets the stage for the literary adventure that is Gilgamesh. Mitchell's love for the epic is evident in his writing style which never suffers from erudite jargon or stuffy, scholarly analysis.

I found this translation completely accessible and a great joy to read!

I was in a wine store the other day, looking for an exquisite wine. Somehow Stephen Mitchell's name came up in the conversation. Then the wine merchant told me how his life had been deeply influenced by Mitchell's translations of Rilke. He said that the essence of Rilke's work had inhabited Mitchell's translations.

So it is no wonder that Mitchell's latest offering, his translation of the ancient epic Gilgamesh, has been chosen as the Book Sense "2004 Highlight for Poetry." Harold Bloom agrees with the wine merchant about Mitchell's ability as a translator when he writes that Mitchell's Gilgamesh "is as eloquent and nuanced as his translations of Rilke."

Mitchell is that rare talent who combines scholarship and exquisite poetic sensibility in the service of a translation. His rendering of Gilgamesh expresses the soul of this most ancient of epics in all of its lyrical splendor and primordial wisdom - so much so that you can feel the beauty and the wisdom on every page.

Mitchell informs us in his introduction that Rilke wrote: "Gilgamesh is stupendous. I consider it to be one of the greatest things that could happen to a person." So when you have a work with such ancient and innate power as Gilgamesh, we are doubly fortunate when someone such as Mitchell gives us the gift of his translation. His scholarship and poetic eloquence resonate in harmony together to capture the essence of the work.

Mitchell says he was possessed by the task of the translation when in reading Gilgamesh one of its lines came to him as "Climb the stone staircase, more ancient than the mind can imagine." I am reminded of how John Fowles described the inception of The French Lieutenant's Woman as an image that came to him of a woman standing alone at the end of a misty pier. The image possessed him and eventually grew into the novel. Mitchell seems to have been equally as possessed by the invitation to climb the stone staircase and translate this most ancient work.

Some have suggested that America is the modern Babylon. Even if this isn't so, Mitchell is certainly a modern Sin-leqi-unninni (the ancient Babylonian editor/poet whose version of Gilgamesh is referred to as the Standard Version). So pick up a copy of Mitchell's new standard version of Gilgamesh, and use your eyes and ears to take in the lyrical beauty and the wisdom more ancient than your mind can imagine. Be careful though; you might wind up having your life touched as deeply as did Rilke and the wine merchant.

Reading an actual translation of Gilgamesh would be a vastly better experience, unless understanding Stephen Mitchell's worldview is really all you want (see below for three excellent translations). I've met Mitchell, discussed the book with him; a nice man, but he has no conception of what he's changed and lost in his free rendition. And that would all be well and good, except he has the temerity to villanize "scholarly" work as dry, boring, and inaccessible - and make serious coin off of it. Sadly, he is guaranteed of making his claim of his book as a more direct and authentic read good for 99% of his readership, because they will never avail themselves of the real thing. In rendering language as he sees fit, what you get is Mitchell's poetic vision, yes; what you do not get is the authentic set of references and world views that the Sumerian and Akkadian language provide - his "version" actually manages to get things substantially wrong from the very first line! When he claims his work as improved or more accessible, the author (not translator) is playing a shell game with you. And he gets your money.

Meanwhile, for less than the price of Mitchell's, one could buy the scholarly editions of A. George, B. Foster, and S. Dalley and get the Real McCoy!

If you're looking for an extremely enjoyable version of Gilgamesh, look no further. I'm glad I put in a few hours of research before deciding which version to read because the other versions may have been accurate to the original tablets, but based on skimming five other versions of the text, the other writing styles were not nearly as comprehensible as Mitchell's. I strongly recommend this version because of the fluidity and entertainment it provides for the modern reader.

If you're not familiar with the epic of Gilgamesh, Mitchell includes a very clear and useful 60 page introduction that provides any reader with an overview of Gilgamesh's history and a basic analysis of the story. If you have no idea what Gilgamesh is about, which was the case for me, you shouldn't have any problems following the story's plot if you start on the first tablet, but I feel that perusing Mitchell's Introduction made the story a lot more enjoyable than if I had dove straight into the story.

One other note about the text: If you have any knowledge about the Old Testament there are numerous allusions between the two texts, which I found cool because Gilgamesh was written before the Old Testament.

I highly suggest this version to all readers interested in the epic.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic work of humankind, a tale rich in adventure, sensuality, and psychological depth and complexity. The narrator reaches out and grabs the reader immediately by inviting him or her to look around the mighty city of Uruk, to observe its walls, temples, and gardens (in our mind's eye, if nothing else)--all the works of the man-god Gilgamesh. Yet, our picture of Gilgamesh quickly becomes rather complex--we see him first as a mighty hero, then we see that he is both loved and feared by his subjects, as he fully exercises his sovereign powers. Gilgamesh tames Enkidu, his wild brother in arms, in a rather unorthodox way but in the end we see it is Enkidu who civilizes and humanizes Gilgamesh, who is forced to face his own mortality. Long after the Sumerian civilization ceased to exist and the grand city of Uruk disappeared beneath the sands, through this tale Gilgamesh lives on in the human consciousness--ironically, granting him the immortality he so desperately sought.

When I set out to read the Epic of Gilgamesh, I learned that reading *THE* Epic of Gilgamesh is an impossible task--it doesn't exist! As a tale that is perhaps more than 4000 years old and likely started as a story told orally, it has been passed down in a number of versions in various levels of completeness, in a number of different languages, over a span of several millennia. When I browsed the reviews here on Amazon, I ran across a number of comments disparaging this "version" on a variety of points--the author does not speak the original languages of the tale (Sumerian, Akkadian, etc.), he has "filled in blanks" and moved around pieces of the text, etc. Some reviewers have mentioned that "truer" and "more scholarly" versions exist, but given the extremely wide and indeterminate origins of this tale mentioned above, those claims seem about valid as someone claiming to have the "true" recipe for chicken soup. What exactly does that mean, after all?

I imagine a comment like that will send a few scholars into apoplexy (if the title of my review did not already), but being an academic myself (albeit in a very different field) I feel it is important to add a healthy dose of skepticism to these claims of the existence of an "original" or "true" story lest one think they are being cheated out of the "real deal" by reading a version such as this one. Likewise, as a speaker and translator of foreign languages myself, I understand the delicate balance (some might call it a trade-off) between staying faithful to the letter versus the spirit of the text--in other words, translation is as much art as it is science. The versions full of brackets and ellipses might be technically accurate, so-called "scholarly" translations of a given intermediate version (such as Sin-leqi-unninni's) or two, but at the same time it is not a faithful recreation of the experience of a Sumerian hearing the tale for the first time. Technical accuracy is easier to quantify than the aesthetic appeal of a given version or translation, but that does not mean that aesthetics are not important--especially for the non-specialist (which I would imagine includes the majority of Amazon shoppers).

To that end, I highly recommend Mitchell's version as it gives the best of both worlds. Through copious notes, Mitchell cites where he varies from the older texts and translations so that one may track and compare versions. Meanwhile, he has crafted English verse that cleanly and clearly tells the tale of Gilgamesh better than any "scholarly" or other "non-scholarly" version that I have laid eyes on. His detailed introduction helps set a context for the text, its discovery, its relationship to other texts (such as epics in other traditions, and the tale's similarities with the story of the Biblical flood), and its relevance today.

If you are interested in more technically accurate versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh (such as more conventional translations of Sin-leqi-unninni's "standard" version) then by all means explore other versions recommended by the reviewers much more knowledgeable than me in this area. But for people like me--the non-specialist more interested in reading the epic (with a lower-case "e") of Gilgamesh than chasing after the phantom "original" or "true" Epic of Gilgamesh--save yourself the trouble of thumbing through different versions and pick this one up.

Stephen Mitchell is no Assyriologist - and he's not much of a poet either. His "new English version" of Gilgamesh is rightly not billed as a translation - it is, in fact, something closer to a retelling, and this rendering of one of humanity's oldest and most profound poems is a shameful attempt to Homerize Gilgamesh into a rollicking Western sword-and-sandal saga. Mitchell dispenses with the incantatory rhythms of the original, opting instead for self-conscious postmodernism, devoid of metaphor and, often, sense. His work makes for a text far more remote than the four thousand-year-old Akkadian original. He even divides Gigamesh into an apostrophe and eleven "books", as if it's the Iliad rather than a bunch of broken, worm-eaten clay tablets he's offering up.

The accompanying notes and essays are full of guesswork and shoddy or superannuated scholarship. Worst of all, Mitchell presents a Gilgamesh tale complete and without blemish, even though we have only about two-thirds of it and much of the epic still remains to be deciphered.

Andrew George's $8 synoptic edition on Penguin is a much better buy. George, a scholar not a poet, adheres slavishly to the original clay tablets and ends up with something that - heavens! - actually reads like poetry. Bless him! And damn Stephen Mitchell for having the crust to think he had something to bring to the table of the great and all-too-mortal King of Uruk.

I remember in Year 9 literature, our teacher came and whacked down a great pile of photocopies on each of our desks. It was bits and pieces of this story called Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving written works around. We were reading the part about the Scorpion Men, I remember, and I thought it was pretty interesting. Since then, I've always been meaning to check it out, and just recently, I picked up this modern version of the Sumerian epic.

Gilgamesh is the story of the giant of the same name, King of the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk. He's handsome, he's strong, he's brave, but unfortunately he's a bit of a tyrant, and he oppresses his people. To stop his brutal ways, the gods create a likeness of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, who they put out in the wilds. Enkidu is a man who grows to become Gilgamesh's closest ally, and over a series of quests is one who changes his life and his life's meaning forever.

This adaption is a version, and not a translation. Stephen Mitchell, the author of this version, admits that he can't read Akkadian (the original language of Gilgamesh) but instead relied on several amplified and literal translations of the text for inspiration. As it is, I found it very, very easy to read, even compared to other modern versions of literature (Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf, for instance). At a relaxed pace, I was able to get through this book in a couple of days.

The book itself I felt could have been a bit shorter. The introduction and endnotes combined take up half the pages! The introduction was all right, but not exactly my cup of tea. To give "Gilgamesh" some contemporary relevance Mitchell tries to draw parallels between Gilgamesh's "pre-emptive strike" on Humbaba and George Bush's attack on Iraq (which just happens to be where Gilgamesh originated). It can see how it would have been a tempting parallel to make in 2004, but I don't think it's a parallel that sits too well. He's reading a bit too much into Gilgamesh's little quest, I feel. In the introduction, I noticed he does that a lot. He paints it to be a very different work to the one I actually went on to read in the introduction, even. He practically tells you the whole thing in the introduction. It felt like I read it twice by the end, actually. The endnotes, meanwhile, are interesting but they aren't numbered, so you won't even know there is a note on something while you are reading until the end. Found that a bit frustrating. Footnotes would have been a bit better, I felt.

Apart from that, it is a very well presented book. The hardcover edition that I read has this lovely ragged yet patterned edge, which looks handmade (though it isn't) and evokes something ancient. The pages themselves all have this great pattern on the edges, which I thought was pretty special too. I hope they present more books with this much care.

As for the Gilgamesh story, like I've said, I don't see as much in it as Mitchell does in his introduction. Mitchell sees it as a world where there is no black and white, where nothing is clear. I thought things were pretty clear, actually. Most characters were just following their lusts, be it their lust for flesh, their lust for fame or their lust for eternal life. Human nature doesn't change really, does it? Speaking of lust, there is an awful lot of sex in this book, especially considering how short it is. I understand why the Bible satirizes, critcizes and condemns the contemporary Babylonian cultures so intensely (if you've read any of the major prophetic books of the Old Testament, you'll know what I'm talking about). Just have a look at some of the stuff that goes on in this book: shrine prostitutes, "omnisexuals", kings who get to sleep with brides on their wedding night, even if they aren't the husband. It is more than a bit off, if you ask me.

I think it's definitely worth a look. Still, I do think one day I'll go and read one of the older, more academic translations, just to compare.

If you are reading this book just don't think you are reading the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh and you'll be fine. This is a modern revery loosely tricked out in Gilgamesh's garments. To say it "takes liberties with the original" is like saying the 1960s folk-rock song "Turn, Turn, Turn" took liberties with the book of Ecclesiastes. As long as you have that straight and you don't credit yourself with a serious engagement with serious ancient literature, have at it. You'll even enjoy a few half-pages.

--
Z

This is not a translation, as other reviewers have designated it. It is a "version", that is, a retelling based on the translations of others. It is overly sugary and cute. Passages from the original are reordered or omitted, while new passages are invented. This "version" doesn't hold a candle to Foster's genuine translation.