The reviewer, Philip Terry, is himself a very good, very clever poet. His "Dictator" is an absolutely brilliant translation into Globish, a simplified English designed for commerce. He reasons that cuneiform had a similar role in cross-language understanding. Terry refuses to use words outside Globish's 1500-word vocabulary, resulting in Gilgamesh being translated "Dictator", but also imposes a bizarre prose form, leaves out holes in the original tablets, and "translates" some idioms literally...all with great humor. The result looks like this:
Then day | light break | …… [And] WILD | MAN make | of he | mouth a | shape… he say | to DIC | TATOR ‘Listen | to the | dream I | dream in | the night The sky | god | + + + the | war god | the god | of know | ledge and | the sun | god all | meet to | gether | in the | great court | of the | sky… And the | sky god | AN + + + | say to | the war | god… “Because | they kill | the MAN | COW of | the sky | + + + and | because | they kill | TREEGUARD the one* | who cut | down the | hard wood | tree on | the moun | tain side | must die”
It shouldn't be your first read of Gilgamesh, but its a fun, insightful second.
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.
I'm not sure what culture(s) you're referring to as "in antiquity", but in the Roman world at least olive oil was mostly for consumption - a way to add some flavor, moisture and calories to bread that was the core staple keeping the population alive. Olive oil was such a necessary part of the diet that emperor Septimius Severus instituted the "Oleum Publicum" making olive oil part of the Annona - free distribution of food primarily within the city of Rome.
The Roman's hadn't invented soap, so oil worked as a cleaning agent since it mixed with oily secretions, then being scraped off with a special purpose "strigil" scraping instrument - usually done at the public baths.
Well, obviously massage is also very enjoyable. If labor is cheap enough, there's no reason it wouldn't be a common indulgement in public bathhouses (which were the only type of bath available to most city dwellers outside the very wealthiest ones, of course).
The ancient authors are quite explicit that the "massage oil" is for external use, not for internal use, so the massage oil did not contain drugs, even if, when used by rich people, it typically included some strong perfume.
For example Pliny the Elder says this at the transition between book 14 (on vines and wine) and book 15 (on olive trees and olive oil):
"There are two liquids that are specially agreeable to the human body, wine inside and oil outside, both of them the most excellent of all the products of the tree class"
A rather similar description is given in Gilgamesh when comparing the pleasures of drinking beer and being massaged with oil, except that the plants that provided alcohol and oil are different, barley instead of grapevines and sesame instead of olive trees.
It was also interesting learning about the role of Poet Laureate, and the stipend. £5,750 per annum, and a barrel of Sherry; the latter being a tradition since 1630.
I love these small slivers of old traditions that are kept up into the modern day.
Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is exceptional, much better IMO than the Tolkien translation. So I'm very excited for this.
The audio performance of it by Bill Wallis is also a family favorite:
I have some friends that come from that part of the world. It brings me to tears that they are good Christians and Muslims but don't remember Inanna nor Asherah, nor all the others who the priests murdered so that Yahweh could thrive...as a widower. Gosh though I don't think old Yahweh would have liked what the priests did to him either...
One isn't well served by something that old. Our knowledge of Akkadian (and the Sumerian predeccesor) has improved since the early twentieth century, as your very link notes. Some Akkadian hapaxes in Gilgamesh that baffled early translators can now be read on the basis of comparative Semitic or other work.
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.
I'll just push back a little in case anyone thinks that all older translations are no good. You're quite right that as scholarship advances, they become more accurate, and sometimes the quality improves as well. But there are other examples (like Pope's Iliad) where the accuracy is secondary to the interpretation and artistry in the target language.
Here however I think you're probably correct (and probably your comment was specific to this, not general). But I'd also recommend OP and other curious folks try downloading a few versions and reading the first few pages or hundred lines, and see which one feels best to you. Enjoying the work is the first task, then appreciating and studying will come more naturally later.
no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian in any of the reviews, and the truely epic and laudable journey that is bieng replaced by the sleezy term 'verse translation', ie : hollywood sceen play ready, as that is what could be the most that can be expected from a former probation officer turned the official british royal panegrist.
edit: the songs of innana and other older actual translations of gilgamesh are there for some little peeks into the sumerian world that continues to define ours in so many subtle ways.
edit, edit: before commenting I did a fairly decent search for any details on this 'book' , of which nothing that I found written in plain text offered anything other than the standard devious prevercations found when some politico/legalistic thing is bieng floated.
And I can state with absolute certitude that this 'translation/rewrite' of Gilgamesh will not age well even in the tiny demographic it is aimed at and will go further out on the limb and suggest that this 'work' will soon be evaluated and found to contain certain 'isms' from some of the one name only agregators of our literary present.
> as that is what could be the most that can be expected from a former probation officer turned the official british royal panegrist.
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.
> no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian in any of the reviews
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
Loads of "translators" not trained in the original language have written Introductions where they state such things. That doesn't mean their defense of their enterprise holds water. There are a few translations out there by Armitage's forebears that ought to be seen purely as representative of their own poetry instead of an actual translation of a classic work.
Still, one has to give a pseudotranslator credit for admitting their method, unlike in famous cases like Stephen Mitchell or Coleman Barks where the edition doesn't even note that the supposed translator has no background in the field.
Martha Roth talks about one of the great benefits of working on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary being that scholars were, by necessity, exposed to a broad assortment of texts. The people who worked on the dictionary had a wide view of the entire culture that is virtually impossible to get today, especially as scholars are pressured to specialize more and more. (Roth, herself, specialized in ancient Mesopotamian law.)
Miguel Civil was probably the most famous example of this.
It looks like he has not studied any Akkadian. He is apparently reliant on glosses by Assyriologist Jacob Dahl and presumably other translations.
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.
> no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian
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.
A significant portion of the English canon of verse doesn't rhyme, from most of Shakespeare to Milton (the latter who called rhyme "the invention of a barbarous age"), from the Anglo-Saxon era all the way to the twentieth century.
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.
Then day | light break | …… [And] WILD | MAN make | of he | mouth a | shape… he say | to DIC | TATOR ‘Listen | to the | dream I | dream in | the night The sky | god | + + + the | war god | the god | of know | ledge and | the sun | god all | meet to | gether | in the | great court | of the | sky… And the | sky god | AN + + + | say to | the war | god… “Because | they kill | the MAN | COW of | the sky | + + + and | because | they kill | TREEGUARD the one* | who cut | down the | hard wood | tree on | the moun | tain side | must die”
It shouldn't be your first read of Gilgamesh, but its a fun, insightful second.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in knowing more about the work.
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.
Probably because everyone smelled pretty bad most of the time, and skin diseases were everywhere. Oil was likely a relief.
Well, as a modern reader, I take 'massage oil' to be Opoids.
For example Pliny the Elder says this at the transition between book 14 (on vines and wine) and book 15 (on olive trees and olive oil):
"There are two liquids that are specially agreeable to the human body, wine inside and oil outside, both of them the most excellent of all the products of the tree class"
A rather similar description is given in Gilgamesh when comparing the pleasures of drinking beer and being massaged with oil, except that the plants that provided alcohol and oil are different, barley instead of grapevines and sesame instead of olive trees.
I love these small slivers of old traditions that are kept up into the modern day.
If that's the original stipend value, it shows that poets were well appreciated.
1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poet_Laureate_of_the_United_Ki...
2: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...
£5,750 in the 1950s would be £177,606.06 today according to the same BoE calculator. 4.58% annual inflation, higher than I expected...
The audio performance of it by Bill Wallis is also a family favorite:
https://www.audible.com/pd/Sir-Gawain-and-the-Green-Knight-A...
https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/epic-of-gilgamesh-ebook.htm...
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.
Here however I think you're probably correct (and probably your comment was specific to this, not general). But I'd also recommend OP and other curious folks try downloading a few versions and reading the first few pages or hundred lines, and see which one feels best to you. Enjoying the work is the first task, then appreciating and studying will come more naturally later.
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
edit: the songs of innana and other older actual translations of gilgamesh are there for some little peeks into the sumerian world that continues to define ours in so many subtle ways.
edit, edit: before commenting I did a fairly decent search for any details on this 'book' , of which nothing that I found written in plain text offered anything other than the standard devious prevercations found when some politico/legalistic thing is bieng floated. And I can state with absolute certitude that this 'translation/rewrite' of Gilgamesh will not age well even in the tiny demographic it is aimed at and will go further out on the limb and suggest that this 'work' will soon be evaluated and found to contain certain 'isms' from some of the one name only agregators of our literary present.
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.
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
Still, one has to give a pseudotranslator credit for admitting their method, unlike in famous cases like Stephen Mitchell or Coleman Barks where the edition doesn't even note that the supposed translator has no background in the field.
The entire cultural context of that society and work is gone and we have but a few shards thereof.
Miguel Civil was probably the most famous example of this.
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.
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.
No rhyme in the original doesn't mean there should be no rhyme in the English. Akkadian and English are different languages. English verse rhymes.
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.
What mattered was the periodicity of rhythm, i.e. the periodicity of intonation patterns, stress patterns and length patterns, similarly as for music.