Gilgamesh

About this book

"There have been other English accounts of this hero with a thousand descendants, but this is the first one that is as much poetry as scholarship." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist This is 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, and "brings a fresh interpretation to [its] power" (John Ray, The Times Literary Supplement ). "Captures the elegiac and ironic undertones of Gilgamesh's failed search for immortality. One senses that [Ferry] has restored the poetry of this oldest epic." — Publishers Weekly "Like Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat or Ezra Pound's Cathay , Mr. Ferry's Gilgamesh is a miraculous transformation of [the] original into his own, utterly distinctive idiom . . . [Ferry's] technical genius and literary sophistication evoke not only the hero's anguish, but the rage and despair of the untouchable." —Tom Sleigh, The New York Times Book Review