He meets another part-god-part-man, Enkidu, and the two become very good friends. Gilgamesh is a king, part god and part man. I’m very happy to say it wasn’t as difficult as I thought. As Jason said in his review, it’s very short, but I was expecting to struggle through it because it’s epic poetry, or at least “verse narrative.” That’s why I chose this for my out-of-my-comfort-zone selection for the 9 in ’09 Challenge. So, despite probably not being the best day for reading in general, given my condition, this was actually surprisingly easy to read. So, I pulled Gilgamesh off the shelf for a short, lighter read while I laid on the couch with an ice pack on my neck. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Most of today I’ve been practically an invalid, and have had to leave off reading Vanity Fair because it’s too heavy to carry in one hand. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.

Andrew George’s gripping translation brilliantly combines these into a fluent narrative and will long rank as the definitive English Gilgamesh.įor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. The Babylonian version has been known for over a century, but linguists are still deciphering new fragments in Akkadian and Sumerian. Alongside its themes of family, friendship and the duties of kings, the Epic of Gilgamesh is, above all, about mankind’s eternal struggle with the fear of death. The story tells of Gilgamesh’s adventures with the wild man Enkidu, and of his arduous journey to the ends of the earth in quest of the Babylonian Noah and the secret of immortality. Miraculously preserved on clay tablets dating back as much as four thousand years, the poem of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, is the world’s oldest epic, predating Homer by many centuries. Andrew George's 'masterly new translation' (The Times) of the world's first truly great work of literature

The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous