Penguin Epics : The Epic of Gilgamesh: 01 - Softcover

Unknown

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141026286 ISBN 13: 9780141026282

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2006

Synopsis

A great king, strong as the stars in Heaven...

Enkidu, a wild and mighty hero, is created by the gods to challenge the arrogant King Gilgamesh. But instead of killing each other, the two become friends.

Travelling together to the Cedar Forest, they fight and slay the evil monster Humbaba. But when Enkidu is killed, his death haunts and breaks the mighty Gilgamesh. Terrified of mortality, he resolves to find the secret of eternal life...

About this title

Review:

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a splendid work--and so is Andrew George's new translation of it. Powerful, moving and intensely readable, this great Babylonian story about man's fear of mortality, first written down more than four thousand years ago, was rediscovered in 1872. Since then it has grown piece by piece, as scholars translate the cuneiform text on more and more pieces of clay tablets discovered by archaeologists: jigsaw puzzles with many of the pieces missing.

This new edition, the most complete ever published, is the culmination of a dozen years of research by a dedicated academic at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. It contains the standard version of the Epic, with many of the gaps in the fragmentary clay tablets filled by painstaking comparison with parallel passages from earlier versions, including the first time five very early Sumerian poems of a quiet different version in which Gilgamesh is known as Bilgames. It is a tribute both to the translator and to the unknown authors of the original that the whole work is a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous, but always stimulating read, as fascinating, and surely just as relevant today, as it was four thousand years ago. --David V. Barrett

Review:

"It's among the oldest surviving works of Western civilization, from before literature was literature. It's my go-to whenever loss and life have tumbled me (often). Amazingly, and perhaps depressingly (When will they ever learn?), Gilgamesh tackles all the issues we are dealing with today: a bad leader and how he becomes an enlightened one (here's hoping), environmental degradation, class and race -- i.e. who gets to be called human -- lust and love; loss and death. The language is haunting, incantatory, at the border of song and silence."
--Julia Alvarez

"Andrew George has skillfully bridged the chasm between a scholarly re-edition and a popular work"
--London Review of Books

"Humankind's first literary achievement...Gilgamesh should compel us as the well-spring of which we are inheritors...Andrew George provides an excellent critical and historical introduction."
--Paul Binding, Independent on Sunday

"This volume will endure as one of the milestones markers...[George] expertly and easily conducts his readers on a delightful and moving epic journey."
--Samuel A. Meier, Times Literary Supplement

"Appealingly presented and very readably translated...it still comes as an exhilarating surprise to find the actions and emotions of the Sumerian superhero coming to us with absolute immediacy over 30-odd centuries.
--Scotsman

"Andrew George has formed an English text from the best of the tablets, differentiating his complex sources but allowing the general reader a clear run at one of the first enduring stories ever told."
--Peter Stothard, The Times

"An exemplary combination of scholarship and lucidity...very impressive...invaluable as a convenient guide to all the different strands which came together to produce the work we now call Gilgamesh."
--Alan Wall, Literary Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0141026286
• ISBN 13: 9780141026282
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80