Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem

by Michael Schmidt

Reflections on a lost poem and its rediscovery by contemporary poets

Gilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist. It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it tells the story of a great king, his heroism, and his eventual defeat. It is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Acclaimed literary historian Michael Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today.

Schmidt describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis. Fragments of the poem, incised on clay tablets, were scattered across a huge expanse of desert when it was recovered in the nineteenth century. The poem had to be reassembled, its languages deciphered. The discovery of a pre-Noah flood story was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, and the poem's allure only continues to grow as additional cuneiform tablets come to light. Its translation, interpretation, and integration are ongoing.

In this illuminating book, Schmidt discusses the special fascination Gilgamesh holds for contemporary poets, arguing that part of its appeal is its captivating otherness. He reflects on the work of leading poets such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose own encounters with the poem are revelatory, and he reads its many translations and editions to bring it vividly to life for readers.

Genres: Poetry, History, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Mythology, Classics, Middle East

192 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2019

About the author

Michael Schmidt is a literary historian, poet, novelist, translator, and anthologist as well as an editor and publisher. His books include The Novel: A Biography and The First Poets. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an OBE in 2006 for services to poetry and higher education. He lives in Manchester, England.

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fantastic book this is, the perfect introduction to that strange text, one of the oldest narratives we know (imagine, the oldest fragments date from the end of the 3rd millennium BCE). I read the Gilgamesh story for the first time 25 years ago in a heavily edited version and then it didn't mean much to me, it seemed like a hero story like there are dime a dozen. But the past five months I read a great amount of studies on ancient Mesopotamian history, and a few of the ancient stories of that time, and that made me reconsider.

Schmidt convinced me of the enormous value and the unique quality of the Gilgamesh story., especially in its more coherent ‘Standard Babylonian’ version, composed at the end of the 2nd millennium. Another strong point of this book is that Schmidt zooms in on the different and often very diverging translations (in English). Quite a few of them take great liberty with the historical and textual reality of the story. Especially the translation of N.K. Sandars, dating from 1960 but still popular, is the culprit: she deliberately distorted the story to give it more dramatic power, and she couldn’t even read Sumerian nor Akkadia. Scmidt’s preference clearly is for the rather extensive, very academic translation by Andrew George (versions in 1999, 2003 and 2016), although I suspect that it will be too detailed for the average reader. Anyway, this is a great little book, about a great story! More extensive review in my History account on Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Sense of History]

Nothing but praise for this beautiful little book. I think Schmidt strikes the right note: he knows perfectly how to present the historical background of both the story and the cuneiform tablets it was written on, as well as highlighting the poetic and dramatic power of the story. If you follow Schmidt, reading Gilgamesh, the first great epic that we know, is an illustration of a postmodernist take on life. After all, we know only well 2/3 of the text of what is called the 'Standard version', composed somewhere at the end of the 2nd millennium BCE; there are even passages where we only have a few words per line. At the same time, there are several older versions of certain story parts, so that some gaps can be filled up to a certain point. So, there is quite a lot of room for interpretation. Moreover, new fragments regularly surface, which almost always force a reinterpretation. “No one institution possesses a full text of Gilgamesh in Standard Babylonian. It is now a jigsaw puzzle with pieces scattered across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. The pieces of the jigsaw are mixed in with pieces of other puzzles, themselves spread across many centuries and several languages.”

Schmidt's conclusion is therefore correct that "the poem remains provisional, shifting like dunes". Which immediately means that as a reader you are challenged to give meaning to what is there (and what is not there): “it does and gives something exceptional to readers, something that follows not only from the remote figures and their world, but from our experience of making, investing our own critical and creative energies, in the process of reading. We play a primary role in the poem, we occupy it as we might a great sculpture: a broken form we – in reading – mend, a space we fill out, in which we find things we did not know, that change us.”

The author does a great job highlighting both the poetic power and the dramatic content of the story. And that is indeed stronger than you would expect from a text that seems to come from the very beginning of human civilization. But this feeling again underestimates the historical reality behind this story: by the time the Standard Version was engraved on the clay tablets, the Mesopotamian region already had more than 1,500 years of intense urban culture. Thanks to my temporary reading program on Mesopotamian history (the past five months), I have been able to see how empires and cultures succeeded each other in this still very limited region, with a fairly high degree of homogeneity and an enormous range (almost the entire present Middle East). In our Western conceit, we underestimate how intense and complex life was back then. And that is also apparent from the Gilgamesh story that deals with almost all human essentials: friendship and love, adventure and strive, hybris and short-sightedness, fear of death and the quest for immortality, … all set in a gripping story. Schmidt did a wonderful job to make it come into its own. Rating 3.5 stars.
For a more substantive and formal analysis, I refer to my review of the story itself: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this concurrently with the Stephen Mitchell rendition of Gilgamesh as the Classics of the Western Canon group explored this epic poem. Less than 200pp, this book stuffs a lot of information about the history of Gilgamesh, how it was discovered in its many fragments strewn across Persia, written in different centuries and languages; dead languages at that(!!) between the covers. The deciphering of those languages was every bit as miraculous as it was with Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Schmidt also discusses and critiques the varying translations and renderings of this epic poem. Oh dear, I used the word epic and I'm not sure Schmidt would agree with that, as he points out.
The book also has chapters on each tablet giving us the gist of what occurs and some analysis.
If you are interested in a more erudite review of the book, I refer you to Tamara's excellent review!!

[Tamara Agha-Jaffar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem by Michael Schmidt explores various aspects of this very ancient poem from Mesopotamia. In this relatively short but densely packed book, Schmidt provides an overview of the discovery of the clay tablets scattered across the Arab world, Turkey, and southern Iran; the fragmentary nature of what has survived; the many translations, interpretations, and iterations; its influence on modern writers; and speculations as to why the poem continues to fascinate.

Gilgamesh is a work in progress. There is no single, complete copy of the poem. It is a patchwork of fragments from different time periods, in different languages, discovered in different locations. Some of the many gaps can be plugged by referring to a more recent tablet, while others cannot be filled at all and are indicated by ellipses and/or plus signs. To complicate matters further, the meaning of the cuneiform symbols has changed over time, so the same symbol may mean something different elsewhere. And as new discoveries are made, the meaning behind existing symbols will have to be revisited.

A chapter is dedicated to each of the 12 surviving tablets. Schmidt outlines the content and weaves in and out of the Old Babylonian and Standard Babylonian texts while examining the differences between them. He compares different translations of the same passage, critiquing them and noting where a translator has been lax by taking unwarranted liberties with the text or by injecting a modern perspective on this ancient poem. He is not shy about expressing his opinions, arguing that because the nature of the poem is “uncertain, porous,” it has attracted a variety of translations. He eschews translations not performed by Assyrioligists since they have not relied on original sources but are translations of translations. And he will not suffer any distortions when it comes to a translation although he does allow for imaginative retellings that don’t claim to be translations.

What emerges from this study is Schmidt’s unwavering passion for the poem and his insistence that it should be allowed to speak for itself so as to be appreciated on its own terms. He is wary of translations that aim for accessibility to a modern audience by glossing over the poems “otherness.” He celebrates the original scholars who poured over the tablets, meticulously and conscientiously deciphering each symbol. And he describes the intense sensation he experiences when handling one of the copyist tablets.

Michael Schmidt has offered a very informative and engaging commentary on the life of this very ancient poem and the challenges it presents. His work is informed by his unabashed love for the poem and his attempts to dive into its possible meanings while adhering faithfully to the actual text.

Highly recommended for its informative exploration of this very ancient, enigmatic poem.

My book reviews are also available at www.tamaraaghajaffar.com

[Steve Ellerhoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Michael Schmidt gives us a delightful guided tour through the epic of Gilgamesh as a poem, focusing on how new it is to our awareness in the west and how it has been translated in a range of ways by a lot of different people. The way he weaves through the various translations and what he likes and dislikes about each is so personable and charming, the little book drawing you right in as if he's an old friend geeking out for your exclusive benefit. For anyone with any kind of interest in the world's oldest survivng buddy narrative, this is a great, light read that is also full of valuable observations and incisive thoughts. Highly recommended.

[Libby Beyreis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh, this book. I normally *love* elevated language, thinking deeply about the past, and interrogating literature; and I've been interested in Gilgamesh lately, so I thought this book would be perfect. Sadly, it just annoyed the crap out of me instead. I felt like a lot of times the author was talking simply because he was in love with the sound of his own voice, rather than having anything new to say relative to the previous three paragraphs. It's surprising to me that such a short book should be in such desperate need of an editor for length and clarity, but here we are.

[David Sogge · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a book of less than 200 pages, it does a lot of work. It presents in some detail “the oldest long poem in the world”, explaining its historical setting and annotating its arcane meanings. It further tells the story of the poem's discovery and re-assembly out of a jigsaw of clay pieces on which it had been written. By recounting how linguists, historians and especially poets have continued to interpret it, and how translators have done justice to it (or not), the book also sheds reflexive light on prejudices and preoccuptions in the modern era. An erudite critic and historian of literature (Lives of the Poets: The History of Poets and Poetry; The Novel: A Biography, among other works) Schmidt is also an entertaining wordsmith. What a pleasure it was to have discovered this absorbing, multi-faceted jewel of a book. Why can’t there be more like it?

[Antonio Troisi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book. Gives the story of the epic as well as an analysis of the different versions and the approach to telling the epic in all its complexity. Schmidt examines the difficulties in telling a story based on tablets and fragments spanning not only thousands of miles but also thousands of years. The only negative was that this point was belabored and became redundant. I learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed.

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific Overview of Many Translations/Versions
Review of the Princeton University Press hardcover (Sept. 2019)

[Hawthorn Mineart · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn’t get past the author’s homophobia and the Judeo-Christian lens through which he filters his interpretation of the translations. The comparisons of various translations was good, and a place from me to consider further studies.

[Anshuman Swain · Rating 4 out of 5]

A critical account of Gilgamesh - the epic - the poem - whatever one wishes to term it. The author presents a deft and detailed account of the intricacies of producing an understandable modern version of the work. And yes, the work itself receives its full description (although filled with discussions about possible meanings). Quite an interesting read!

[Jas Lise · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting read!
I had expected it to be a translation of the poem and was surprised to find it was more an analysis on the history of the poem in its adaptions, language and story - which I felt was a nice surprise.
Reading Schmidt's interpretation of 'Gilgamesh' through his own thoughts and understanding of the story and through his interpretations of others' interpretations was very interesting.
I found myself, at parts, but entertained and interested in the referenced material, the changes in narrative structure and how the poem has evolved other time- even in name; "Epic" "Poem" and most often just "Gilgamesh" - but also at times felt the descriptions weren't very engaging and at other times I would myself disagreeing with a point Schmidt had made - not particularly a negative thing, what is the point but to develop your own interpretation from the sources provided.

I will say it opened my eyes to other translators and specialists involved in the world of "Gilgamesh" whose books I would love to read and for that I am grateful, it was also just enjoyable to get back into reading about Gilgamesh again and learning more about the history of the tale.

[Thomasin Propson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admit it: I've never read any translations of Gilgamesh. My knowledge hereto was limited to the short Next Gen episode (also mentioned in this book, which is fun!) and recognizing the 11th tablet is is one of the "documents" which "proves" that Noah's Flood [the Deluge] is "real." Thankfully, you don't need to know the story before reading Schmidt's book to find value.

What I liked:
- learning that Assyriology is a field of study.
- Old Babylonian = Sumerian; Standard Babylonian = Akkadian
- recommendations for (and warnings/cautions against) various translations/interpretations published to date.
- having the list of characters (e.g., Gilgamesh himself, Enkidu, Shamhat, Ishtar, Humbaba) and gods so I can recognize them in the future.
- the East German poem 'Der Holunder offnet die Monde' [The Elder Tree Opens Its Moons] by Peter Huchel [trans. by Michael Hambuger] ---- Wonderful!
- each tablet (there are 12) is not a chapter but a "count of lines - generally between 300 and 360, though some are shorter." The story(ies) as we know them are created from numerous versions/copies, as every tablet discovered so far is broken/partial.

Recommended to anyone who wants to nerd out a bit over olden time (like, really really olden time) stories and languages.

[Johnnie Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I've heard of Gilgamesh the way one hears of Greek and Roman myths, I didn't know anything about it. This book presents the story, but goes much deeper. The lines of this oldest of poems were written on tablets. While many of them have been found, there are definitely lines missing. The original languages--Old Babylonian and Standard Babylonian--are dead so first they had to be deciphered. Since then various translators and poets have written their own versions which seem to reflect their own sensibilities. The book is an interesting overview of an interesting (and ongoing) journey for this ancient poem.

[Aaron Jesse O'Hare-Lewis · Rating 1 out of 5]

A shapeless collage of excerpts from various translations, with arrogant assessments of their worth as commentary. The New Yorker review that led me here was a blowjob. But there was at least some interesting history mixed in with the chaff, and excerpts which introduced me to more interesting authors.

[Pixie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charmingly written, a better-than-Cliff-notes intro to a poem and the scholarly and poetic industries surrounding it, all of which was new to me. Thank you, Michael Schmidt!

[Bertha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the history behind the life of Gilgamesh, and how it is never finished in time and still brings an unknown to the art of this poem; with all the translations out there and the different tablets found in different languages brings multiple interpretations of the story of Gilgamesh.

[Haaris Mateen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is Gilgamesh? Michael Schmidt's beautiful book excavates the origins and meaning of an ancient chronicle, or a collection of genres or, quite simply, a poem, that resists interpretation through classical and modern structures and conventions.

The poem dates back to before 2000 B.C. In it, you find the story of a great Deluge, where a man, Uta-napishti builds a boat that saves humans and animals alike. A familiar story? In fact, the fervor first associated with Gilgamesh was spurred by comparisons with and echoes of Biblical themes found in its story.

Unlike the Homeric epics, scholarship on Gilgamesh is recent: cuneiform had to be translated; tablets had to be discovered and brought together; the Sumerian [Old Babylonian] and Akkadian [Standard Babylonian] accounts had to be compared.

And so Gilgamesh is a poem that continues to change as our understanding of that ancient period changes, and as further discoveries are made: perhaps, of missing sections of extant tablets, or fresh discoveries of older, but different, versions of the same chronicle.

The story of Gilgamesh is fascinating. Here is a mighty man who starts off as an impetuous and tyrannical ruler. He meets his match in Enkidu, a wild man who is tamed, and who in turn tames Gilgamesh. Sample this version from Jenny Lewis,

At last they called | the goddess Aruru
Fertile womb-goddess | who made the first humans
She made life spurt | from the mud of the river
She made life spring | from the clay of the uplands.

The great Aruru | knew the right answer --
To fashion a man | equal to Gilgamesh
An untamed man | to tame the tyrant
An untaught man | to teach him secrets.

Out of the silence | out of the sunlight
Out of the shadows | that carpet the forest
Stepped a man, beautiful | strong like an eagle
Stepped a man, god-like | lithe as a lion.

His hair rolled down | like waves of a torrent
His beard luxuriant | bushy as barley
Dense and waving | the hair of his body
Like an animal god | he stood in the forest.

Together, they seek glory until Enkidu dies. Gilgamesh is distraught -- by his companion's death and by the prospect of death itself. He seeks to conquer it and goes to the end of the world to get it. (Does he succeed?) The gods are in the story at every turn. They determine fate but that doesn't stop the characters from launching into vicious diatribes against them.

Schmidt's excitement is infectious. What makes Gilgamesh extraordinary is that sections of the poem are missing. Even the chunks that are present come from a different world -- it is difficult to translate faithfully the delivery of the lines. And the story doesn't conform to standard definitions of, say, an "epic." The challenge in translation invites the reader to participate in the interpretation of the poem. Schmidt compares a large number of translations. What stood out for me was both that the basic story is the same but the emphasis, the interpretation, and the liberties each translator takes is worlds apart. How intriguing.

Schmidt's main message is to let the poem stand in its own, as yet uncharted, world. To bring the poem to a level of relatability is to rob us of a chance to experience something that stands outside our own lives. To call it an epic or to classify it as such is to force it to conform to our expectations, which in turn influences the choices translators make.

I sympathize with Schmidt's message but every great story will always inspire people in their own way. Some will respect the "blank canvas" that it provides, but the tendency to re-interpret ancient stories to our own times is timeless.

I suppose the reason for Schmidt's caution is that we still don't know enough about Gilgamesh, and to make it a pop-reference, such as Sandars' Penguin Classics translation, or more egregiously, Marvel's Eternals, is to distort this process of pure discovery.

That's Schmidt's plea: Gilgamesh is a treasure chest, giving something different to any reader who seeks to engage with it. So let us engage with it in a way that is closer to the spirit of the original. Without labels or expectations. To quote,

Open the tablet-box of cedar,
release its clasp of bronze!

[Lift] the lid of its secret,
pick up the tablet of lapis lazuli and read out --
the travails of Gilgamesh, all that he went through.

[John Gossman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Gilgamesh: the life of a poem” is a work of literary history and criticism. While it contains excerpts and a summary of the standard poem, it does not have the full text. Schmidt comments on various translations and versions, including Stephen Mitchell’s and Andrew George’s works, which I've also just read. His primary message seems to be that Gilgamesh deserves to be treated as its own thing, drawing as closely as possible on the original text and intent of the poet, rather than interpreting it in modern terms like “epic” or applying modern poetic forms. He acknowledges that this is, of course, impossible given how little we know about the original culture, language, or authors, but that by struggling with the problem, we can gain more insight than by simply sitting back and reading it for enjoyment like we would the Lord of the Rings.

Schmidt draws on academics and poets, and a large part of the debate seems to be about whether it is better to read Gilgamesh in a “cleaned up” version like Mitchell’s or an annotated version like George’s that more closely resembles the source material, including the damage to the tablets. At first, my thought was these were two different audiences: general readers and professional scholars. But as I read further and compared the Mitchell and George versions myself, I started to see the appeal of the annotated text. It is not much less readable, and you get a greater sense of the tale of the tale, the ongoing scholarship, and the antiquity of the text. I like Mitchell’s translation, but if I reread Gilgamesh, I’ll probably read George’s.

“Gilgamesh: the life of a poem” also covers the poem's history and the translation, but then even Mitchell covers this in his introduction, and George goes into great detail. More interesting is Schmidt’s discussion of questions like “Is Gilgamesh an Epic in the classical form?” or some other type of work. Yes, there is some literary analysis that is a little too deep for me, but the book succeeds in making one think twice about what we’ve read. I found myself going back to the George book and re-reading some sections I had missed.

But by far, my favorite part of “Gilgamesh: the life of a poem” is the chapter titled “How you tell it.” Here Schmidt compares and contrasts many versions of one early scene where Shamhat seduces and civilizes Enkidu. He quotes each version and shows how each author makes choices of words, notation, and poetic forms. For example, R. Campbell Thompson in 1928 used hexameters and described Shamhat’s “bosom” and “comeliness,” whereas more recent versions tend to be more primal and anatomical. Seeing all these approaches side by side helped me understand Schmidt’s criticisms and widened my perspective. Perhaps this chapter should have been near the beginning rather than the end of the book. If it weren’t for this chapter, I’m not sure I could recommend the book except for someone making a scholarly study of Gilgamesh.

The final gift of “Gilgamesh: the life of a poem” was introducing me to Philip Terry and his “Dictator.” “Dictator” is a translation of Gilgamesh into Globish, a simplified English dialect with a vocabulary of only 1500 words. Globish is designed to be an easy-to-learn language for doing business across the world. Terry reasons that cuneiform was originally a way to write records for business that crossed multiple spoken languages and thus analogous to Globish. I found that book immensely entertaining and highly recommend it.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author takes as given that the only appropriate goal for the modern usage of Gilgamesh is scholarly translation. Anything else is, in his view, wrong-headed, or even an error. If you agree with him, this is a fascinating and instructive book. If you disagree, this book can be frustrating and dogmatic. He is particularly annoyed by characterizing the poem as an epic (he thinks it is not), modernizing the poem's formal structure, interpolating when lines of the poem as missing, and "writers who feel entitled to the poem even when they lack the linguistic means to look it directly in the face." This quote is from page 1! The gauntlet has been thrown. By page 4 he has worked up to: "Most literary translators fill in Gilgamesh's blanks and resolve its riddles, trying to free us to be contented literary consumers, untroubled by the distracting questions that it raises..." Schmidt's attitude gets in the way of truly enjoying his passion for and knowledge of the poem.

[Hoho Ghumpus · Rating 4 out of 5]

We consume books as if they were finished works. We imagine an author sifting through ideas, deciding what to exclude and emphasize, rearranging material to satisfy dramatic or pedagogical purposes, and then presenting to the world their best attempt at a coherent narrative. The reconstruction and translation of ancient works—especially fragmented texts written in now-dead languages—force us to question this vision. Schmidt's curious little book is partly history of the discovery and interpretation of Gilgamesh, humanity's first written story, and partly a meditation on the experience of reading. The oldest book in the world is still evolving. We know the present text is incomplete, with new fragments discovered every decade. Our comprehension of the language, culture, and history of ancient Sumer is likewise gradually improving. It's curious that a four thousand year-old book is still changing, but the greater revelation is that every book is dynamic in this way. It interacts with our minds, our culture, our needs, and its meaning and relevance shift in every moment. That makes bottling its magic more difficult—and also calls into question the value of reviews like this one. We think about a book, we speak to others about what we've thought, but really the book is helping us think about ourselves, helping us describe ourselves to others. How strange and lovely that marks on a page, or a clay tablet, should have such staggering power.

[Maggie]

Fascinating small book. Excellent introduction to Gilgamesh, but also a good discourse on translation and poetry and style. The last chapter showcases the same passage about Enkidu in nine (9!) different translations.

There's also a passage on oral tradition, and what happens when something originally passed along orally is written down:

"...when a poem is at last committed to clay, papyrus, parchment or paper, the volume, as it were, is turned off. We are left with running subtitles, hearing replaced by reading. [snip] Those who have hitherto been members of an audience, with a pooled interest and shared response, now stand single, clutching the tablet. [snip] It's also the case that, once the poem is written down, there is no longer any need to remember it. We can always look it up and read it, assuming we can read, when we return to it." (pp 131-132)

Joan Acocella's review in the New Yorker is great: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

[· · Rating 3 out of 5]

(30 August, 2020)

A quick account, and analysis, of the history of Gilgamesh: the story, the 'epic' and the translations. Even when Schmidt was not convincing on his own, his habit of falling back on the clay tablets themselves (or, at best, his view of them) gave more weight to his reasoning. I've never been a fan of the twelfth tablet (Enkidu... alive? Gimme a break!) and knowing someone else shares my view is comforting... to a point.

At times it felt the author was being overly judgemental but after my initial reaction, it seemed it was more an educated opinion of someone who obviously loves 'The Epic of Gilgamesh'.

Reading this just made me want to read every single translation I could get my hands on, thank you Mr. Schmidt!

[Zuska · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this so long ago, then got distracted; I had to go back and re-read from the beginning. Finished it in three days this time! It's really a marvelous read. I'm glad I've read two versions of Gilgamesh before reading this, but really, you could as well start with this book. Schmidt gives a tablet by tablet recap, with a discussion beforehand of the (ongoing) development of the poem, and several chapters after the recap that go more deeply into issues that have arisen along the way. I feel most fortunate to live in a time when this lost, most ancient of poems has been recovered, translated, and studied enough that multiple versions are available to me and that a book like Schmidt's is also available. If you are at all interested in Gilgamesh, I highly recommend reading this book.

[Matt Holloway · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schmidt is not a scholar, but he seems to wish he were. This book is his whining plea for some "cultural police" to step in and stop poets like Stephen Mitchell from producing non-scholarly, interpretive versions of Gilgamesh.

[He literally pines for a time when the "cultural police" will "bring Gilgamesh within their protective ring.]

Meanwhile, he makes suggestions like a "scholar with mastery of braille could tell us if the impressions [in the cuneiform tablets] can be read by finger-tip."

C'mon man.

Only giving it 3 stars because I think everybody needs to read Gilgamesh, and if this new book is your entree then so be it.

Glad I checked it out from the library.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have recently read the Epic of Gilgamesh translated by Andrew George. I was pleased to read this analysis afterwards as it made me reflect on the translation I read but also the role of translators and their bearing on translating. I would like to read the German translation of Gilgamesh by Arthur Ungnad when my German language learning is at a level. In my view the 4000 year old poem remains an epic despite commentary to the contrary. Recommended reading for those with an interest in the poem.

[Dixie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I followed my first reading of Gilgamesh with this book, about its history, its many interpretations, and much more. Honestly I expected this to be dry and it was engaging instead. It even referenced the *Star Trek: The Next Generation* episode "Darmok" in which Captain Picard tells a short version of the Gilgamesh story to the alien captain. (Note: the Gilgamesh "story," not "epic"! One of the take-aways from this book.)

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work is an important treatment of the oldest poem left to us. He basically critiques many of the well known translations while in his own way retells a post-modern story. He won't call it an Epic, but insists it be Gilgamesh. He doesn't believe it has an oral tradition, which is nonsense as some of the episodes had to be told around camp fires and in courts.

[Robert Walkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific book. It provides background information on the history of the text. Of special interest is reading the various modern poets who have tried their hand at translating Gilgamesh. Schmidt, author of Lives of the Poets, shows that Gilgamesh is a fluid document. It is changing all the time as new fragments are found and as new translators provide new translations.

[Tim Deforest · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoy the author's scholarship and fair-minded examination of the pros and cons of different translations. His discussion on how we should view the poem as we read it and the difficulty of not distorting it by viewing it through modern sensibilities or forcing it into a specific genre is quite fascinating.