Overview

Originating nearly four thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, the epic of Gilgameshtells the story of a tyrannical king and his wild counterpart, Enkidu, spawned by the gods to rein in the king’s cruel tendencies. They face off in a violent wrestling match, but the clash forges a bond between them. The deep, fiercely intimate camaraderie that emerges carries the two men through extraordinary adventures, from a bloody battle with the fearsome forest guardian, Humbaba, to a cataclysmic struggle with the Bull of Heaven. As the friends venture further into the unknown, they find themselves confronted with the ultimate, defining fate of all humankind. At once a story about love among men and a timeless meditation on loss, grief, and the longing to outlast death, Gilgamesh is at its core one of the oldest and most majestic depictions of human resilience and dignity. Now, in the hands of Simon Armitage, poet laureate of the United Kingdom, this primeval epic swells and flows in rhythmic, contemporary English with a vitality and immediacy that only a genuinely poetic rendering can achieve. Grounded in the latest scholarship but always propulsively readable, Armitage’s version brings the ancient text to new life, offering a new generation of readers a thrilling portal into the very dawn of storytelling. PRAISE FOR SIMON ARMITAGE “Simon Armitage . . . continues the tradition of great poet-translators such as Edward FitzGerald, Arthur Waley, and Seamus Heaney.""—John Ashbery “He reminds me of early Auden, a comparison that doesn’t strike me as extravagant.""—Peter Sansom, The Poetry Business “Simon Armitage’s work is earthed—no matter what he is writing about, his poetry is never shallow-rooted.” —Kate Kellaway, Guardian Praise for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight “Drives the force of the old poem through the green Armitage fuse. Highly charged work” —Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize–winning translator of Beowulf “Full of make-believe and festivity, this wonderful narrative poem possesses a Mozartean lightness and wit. . . . Deftly replicate[s] much of the feel and rhythm of the Middle English original.” —Michael Dirda, Wall Street Journal Praise for Pearl “[Armitage] conveys that feeling of the almost-but-not-quite comprehensible, the feeling that can make medieval art at once eerie and wonderful.” —Jo Livingstone, The New Yorker “Armitage continues to contribute the same service to culture as Carson, Heaney, Hughs and Graves; he gives blood transfusions to the texts which deserve preservation.” —Huffington Post [UK]

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9781631496684

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Reviews

""In translating the epic with clarity and linguistic finesse, Armitage proves that it does not take a degree in Assyriology for a poet to tell an enchanting tale or for a reader to step away from it with something powerful. He proves his central argument: 'Nobody owns Gilgamesh, because everybody owns Gilgamesh.'"" -- Asymptote Journal

Author Information

Simon Armitage is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds and poet laureate of the United Kingdom. He has published ten collections of poetry and is the author of four stage plays, over a dozen television films, a libretto, two novels, and three memoirs. His poetry has won numerous awards, including a Gregory Award, a Forward Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

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