Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh is the great epic of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the oldest works in world literature, contemporary with the oldest parts of the Bible. It is the story of a legendary king who achieves heroic victories with the help of the wild man Enkidu; but when his friend dies, Gilgamesh goes in search of the way to escape death, a secret he can only learn from the one man who survived the Great Flood. David Ferry’s new rendering is as lucid and lively as Robert Fitzgerald’s Homer and Richmond Lattimore’s Virgil, but his is more a transformation than a translation. Ferry’s poetry combines faithful attention to the literal meanings of the original with a fine sense for the poetic qualities that make Gilgamesh not only an important docu-ment of ancient Mesopotamia but also a profoundly moving story of the love between companions and the terrible inevitability of death. Gilgamesh is a new masterwork of English poetry, as much Ferry’s own as The Vanity of Human Wishes is Johnson’s rather than Juvenal’s. This edition also includes Ferry’s version of the related Babylonian poem, Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Nether World, as well as an introduction by William L. Moran, Mellon Professor of Humanities at Harvard University.