Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374162271 ISBN 13: 9780374162276

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992

A new verse rendering of the great epic of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the oldest works in Western Literature. Ferry makes Gilgamesh available in the kind of energetic and readable translation that Robert Fitzgerald and Richard Lattimore have provided for readers in their translations of Homer and Virgil.

Review:

This is one of the more recent translations of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, about the hero-king of ancient Mesopotamia whose adventures--searching for eternal life, surviving a worldwide deluge in an ark filled with animals, to name a couple--make up one of oldest pieces of literature on record. David Ferry's version attempts to provide the most readable rendering of the epic, artfully finding a poetic voice that's particularly accessible to the modern ear, as well as working to smooth over the gaps in the poem caused by the fragmentary record of the original clay tablets.

About the Author:

David Ferry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for his translation of Gilgamesh in 1992, has translated The Odes of Horace, The Eclogues of Virgil, and the Epistles of Horace. For Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations he won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, given by the Library of Congress. In 2001 he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2002 he won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. He is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College.