Gilgamesh by Simon Armitage review – an ancient epic is brilliantly translated

If that's the original stipend value, it shows that poets were well appreciated.

However, I do not like that it, like most other comments that provide only partial information about Gilgamesh, fails to mention some details that I consider culturally relevant.

For instance, it lists only 3 benefits of civilization with which the wild man is lured to leave his former life: professional women, eating bread & drinking beer.

I fact, the Gilgamesh epic lists 4 benefits of civilization, the 4th being the pleasure of being massaged with oil (apparently sesame oil is meant, presumably flavored).

In the antiquity, vegetable oil had only a minor role as food, its principal application was for massage, normally as perfumed oil. Massage with oil was a very widespread practice, even among the relatively poor.

The technologies of oil extraction, of milling flour, of making bread and of making beer by fermentation, were indeed major advantages of the settled people living on agriculture, in comparison with hunter-gatherers.

Most comments about Gilgamesh list only the first 3 benefits of civilization, because those are the most easy to understand for modern readers. Massage with oil is much less used today, so many modern readers do not realize that by the time of Gilgamesh (and also millennia later, e.g. in the Roman Empire, where it was still the main use of olive oil) it was considered a pleasure as important as eating and drinking.

Actually, I have this very episode downloaded on my phone and whenever sleep eludes me, I play it. I never lasted more than 30 minutes. I must've listened to it hundreds of time by now.

She, a normal woman, sexually subdued a hand-crafted demigod. Unparalleled.

If you want a free translation online of a great work of literature, you don't have to limit yourself to old public-domain stuff. The shadow libraries will have more recent editions.

Even better, hear it read in a Public Domain audiobook on LibriVox: https://librivox.org/epic-of-gilgamesh-by-e-a-wallis-budge/

https://sophushelle.com/gilgamesh/?amp=1

That is not universally true at all. For example, Milton's Paradise Lost, or much of Shakespeare. There are countless other examples of blank verse in English.

He states very clearly in his introduction what the scope is, how it's being translated and the problems with both translating ancient text from unfamiliar cultures and translating a work that's only partially complete and how he's approached both issues

In a Britain where it’s harder than it has been for fifty years to be from a working/middle-class background and make it in the arts, I think it’s great that a polytechnic graduate, former probation officer is the poet laureate.

There are Sumerian Gilgamesh stories, but The Epic everyone reads is a redaction by the scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni of earlier works written in Standard Babylonian (Akkadian), not Sumerian.

From the introduction:

> Benjamin R. Foster, another esteemed academic author who has made significant contributions to the study and translation of the poem, [...] says, “I have no patience with clueless folk who think they can translate the epic without going to the trouble of mastering Babylonian.” This is a disheartening and discouraging comment. Are we really to accept that satisfactory transmissions of the Gilgamesh story rest entirely in the hands of professionals in the subject of Assyriology, or that the poem is located behind some kind of intellectual force field, or that those of us outside the inner circle must leave such profound work to the fellowship? And what of the counter argument: that the job of translating poetry cannot be fully realized by professors, only by poets?

> Echoing George and Foster to some extent, Michael Schmidt comments, “Interlopers achieve mixed results among the dead languages of the world.” Am I one such interloper, trespassing on hallowed ground? My approach to Gilgamesh has been the same as for my medieval translations, with the hope of producing critically informed work that speaks to the widest readership, attempting to balance linguistic and historical frameworks against literary expectations of the present day. The difference this time is that like almost everyone else on the planet I have no comprehension of Akkadian or other languages of the period, and for his thorough and no-nonsense translations of the cuneiform scripts I am indebted to Jacob L. Dahl, professor of Assyriology and fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, who provided me with the literals to work from. Jacob also answered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of my questions, some of them well below his pay grade, and stuck to the task for three or four more years beyond my wildly optimistic timeframe. I am enormously grateful to Jacob, for being a medium between this world and the world of the long dead, and for help in bringing them back to life. Any errors of judgment or rogue deviations between the files he submitted to me and the publication of this book are entirely of my making.

I'm quite used to native english speakers putting e and i in random order. I understand because 'weird' is more or less pronounced like you would pronounce 'wierd' and english spelling is rather haphazard anyway. But 'bieng' is a a first . Please note, I'm not blaming you! I make plenty of mistakes myself and english spelling is weird. I'm just curious if you are a native english speaker or not?

I have a theory that for (esl) people that have different sounding ei and ie in their native language, this particular part of english spelling is actually easier than for native english speakers.

My guess is that you have english as a second language, because being (be-ing) is pronounced differently than other ei words and a native speaker would probably not write bi-eng ... was I correct?