Gilgamesh
BY STEPHEN MITCHELL
P
OETRY
Parables and Portraits
F
ICTION
The Frog Prince
Meetings with the Archangel
N
ONFICTION
Loving What Is: Four Questions that Can Change Your Life
(with Byron Katie)
The Gospel According to Jesus
T
RANSLATIONS AND
A
DAPTATIONS
Gilgamesh
Bhagavad Gita
Real Power: Business Lessons from the Tao Te Ching
(with James A. Autry)
Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
Genesis
Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
A Book of Psalms
The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis
Tao Te Ching
The Book of Job
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
(with Chana Bloch)
The Sonnets to Orpheus
The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
E
DITED BY
S
TEPHEN
M
ITCHELL
The Essence of Wisdom: Words from the Masters to Illuminate the Spiritual Path
Bestiary: An Anthology of Poems about Animals
Song of Myself
Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology
(with Robert Hass)
The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose
The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry
Dropping Ashes on the Buddha:
The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn
F
OR
C
HILDREN
The Wishing Bone and Other Poems
(illustrated by Tom Pohrt)
The Nightingale, by Hans Christian Andersen
(illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline)
Jesus: What He Really Said and Did
The Creation
(illustrated by Ori Sherman)
B
OOKS ON
T
APE
Gilgamesh
Loving What Is
Bhagavad Gita
Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon
The Frog Prince
Meetings with the Archangel
Bestiary
Genesis
Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus
The Gospel According to Jesus
The Enlightened Mind
The Enlightened Heart
Letters to a Young Poet
Parables and Portraits
Tao Te Ching
The Book of Job
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
STEPHEN MITCHELL
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilgamesh. English.
Gilgamesh / a new English version [by] Stephen Mitchell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Epic poetry, Assyro-Babylonian-Translations into English. I. Mitchell, Stephen, 1943-II. Title.
PJ3771.5.G5E5 2004
892â².1âdc22
2004050072
ISBN-13:978-0-7432-6164-7
ISBN-13:978-1-4391-047-4-3
ISBN-10:Â Â Â 0-7432-6164-X
I
n Iraq, when the dust blows, stopping men and tanks, it brings with it memories of an ancient world, much older than Islam or Christianity. Western civilization originated from that place between the Tigris and the Euphrates, where Hammurabi created his legal code and where
Gilgamesh
was written-the oldest story in the world, a thousand years older than the
Iliad
or the Bible. Its hero was a historical king who reigned in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk in about 2750
BCE.
In the epic, he has an intimate friend, Enkidu, a naked wild man who has been civilized through the erotic arts of a temple priestess. With him Gilgamesh battles monsters, and when Enkidu dies, he is inconsolable. He sets out on a desperate journey to find the one man who can tell him how to escape death.
Part of the fascination of
Gilgamesh
is that, like any great work of literature, it has much to tell us about ourselves. In giving voice to grief and the fear of death, perhaps more powerfully than any book written after it, in portraying love and vulnerability and the quest for wisdom, it has become a personal testimony for millions of readers in dozens of languages. But it also has a particular relevance in today's world, with its polarized fundamentalisms, each side fervently believing in its own righteousness, each on a crusade, or jihad, against what it perceives as an evil enemy. The hero of this epic is an antihero, a superman (a superpower, one might say) who doesn't know the difference between strength and arrogance. By preemptively attacking a monster, he brings on himself a disaster that can only be overcome by an agonizing journey, a quest that results in wisdom by proving its own futility. The epic has an extraordinarily sophisticated moral intelligence. In its emphasis on balance and in its refusal to side with either hero or monster, it leads us to question our dangerous certainties about good and evil.
I began this version of
Gilgamesh
because I had never been convinced by the language of any translation of it that I'd read. I wanted to find a genuine voice for the poem: words that were lithe and muscular enough to match the power of the story. If I have succeeded, readers will discover that, rather than standing before an antiquity in a glass case, they have entered a literary masterpiece that is as startlingly alive today as it was three and a half millennia ago.
G
ilgamesh
is a work that in the intensity of its imagination stands beside the great stories of Homer and the Bible. Yet for two thousand years, all traces of it were lost. The baked clay tablets on which it was inscribed in cuneiform characters lay buried
in the rubble of cities across the ancient Near East, waiting for people from another world to read them. It wasn't until 1850 that the first fragments were discovered among the ruins of Nineveh, and the text wasn't deciphered and translated for several decades afterward. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke may have been the first reader discerning enough to recognize its true literary stature.
“Gilgamesh
is stupendous!” he wrote at the end of 1916. “I ⦠consider it to be among the greatest things that can happen to a person.” “I have immersed myself in [it], and in these truly gigantic fragments I have experienced measures and forms that belong with the supreme works that the conjuring Word has ever produced.” In Rilke's consciousness,
Gilgamesh,
like a magnificent Aladdin's palace that has instantly materialized out of nowhere, makes its first appearance as a masterpiece of world literature.
