The World of Myth Magazine

The poem goes on, detailing 'the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards, the palaces, the temples, the shops, the marketplaces, the houses the public squares' before inviting you to open up a box, take out the stone tablets of the poem, and read:

Find the corner stone and under it the copper box
that is marked with his name. Unlock it. Open the lid.
Take out the tablet of lapis lazuli. Read
how Gilgamesh suffered all and accomplished all.

By the end of the prologue, you are included in the poem as a witness, something that holds throughout the rest of the poem as explore this world with the characters. This is a fantastic way to open a poem like this.

The city of Uruk is important too because it seems to be the only metropolitan area in the entire world. The city is a civilization, so it is also in a sense reality. Everything outside of Uruk is an amalgam of legend and pure fantasy (although it might not have been to the original audience). The two friends that the poem focuses on, Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu, are in some ways between reality and legend themselves. Enkidu is a creature sent by the gods, who at first lives primarily in the wild, and is eventually civilized through a friendship with Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh himself is half man, half god. Both of them are powerful enough to make journeys in days that would take ordinary people weeks. But their journeys are always done without reference to identifiable locations. A bit like Odysseus' wonderings around the Mediterranean in The Odyssey, Gilgamesh's world outside of Uruk is purposely vague, wild, and threatening. Just like people trying to plot the wonderings of Odysseus onto a real-world map, there is probably little use in trying to plot the wonderings of Gilgamesh and Enkidu onto the real world. While the journey in the poem is a real journey for the characters, it is almost like supra-textually it is also a journey through the imagination, with each encounter having some kind of importance to Gilgamesh as a character – like Odysseus's wanderings.

This might sound like it is a complicated poem, but Mitchell succeeds in making painless and enjoyable, especially if you read the introduction along with the poem. This sounds counter intuitive, but the introduction is basically a long form explanation of the poem with quotations. There are also about 80 pages of notes at the end of the book, giving further information on the introduction and the poem itself. The notes go into more detail for people who want a richer understanding of the poem and will not appeal to everyone, but it is still good they are there. There is also a bibliography that seems to be inviting people to look further still, and a glossary of all the names so that any section could be picked up at random and understood without needing to read everything beforehand for context.

The poetry itself is fast, fluid, and amazingly natural iambic blank verse. Mitchell is a poet first and translator second, similar to Robert Fagles - another popular translator of ancient works, and this attitude is really noticeable. Above all else, this book is easily readable, and the words really fit the mood of the poem in a way that is difficult to describe without examples.

There are also repetitions, a common device in ancient poetry, which in one section worth highlighting in book 4 (ancient poetry was split into 'books' but they are basically modern-day chapters) brilliantly shows how long and how repetitive Gilgamesh and Enkidu's journey is between the more heroic events. The heroes journey for about a week without any incidents, but each night Gilgamesh has troubling dreams that are commented on with almost identical wording:

At midnight he awoke. He said to Enkidu
'What happened? Did you touch me? Did a god pass by?
What makes my skin creep? Why am I cold?
Enkidu, my dear friend, I have had a dream,
a dream more horrible than the first.

It is only the dreams that are different. Enkidu is then forced to interpret these dreams in a way that will make his friend happy, but you can almost feel an increasing frustration between the two friends as book 4 goes on, and Enkidu has to keep settling Gilgamesh's mind. This is a wonderful example of storytelling and making the narrative feel large.

Enkidu is a very complex character, but the focus is always on Gilgamesh the mythical hero, and it is a story that is worth reading. It is multi-layered and complex without being complicated. The legend of Gilgamesh lived on long after his possible death, for good reason – his story is great. In real life, Gilgamesh was probably a Sumerian king of Uruk around 2800BC (giving or taking a few hundred years). What little we actually know of him has passed so deep into legends and the mists of time that it is impossible to say if he actually was a real person or not. If he existed, he lived at a time when civilization itself was still in its infancy, and the world was uncharted, unknown, and mysterious. However, real or not, stories of him were passed down until eventually they were written down and written a number of times – there are not just fragments of a single poem, there are fragments of different poems about Gilgamesh that modern scholars compile into a long text that gives us this story.

But it is a story that has to be pieced together from those fragments. Most academic editions of this poem, such as the one by Penguin, presents all of this information – often as footnotes. But this is a textual difficulty that Mitchell has simplified by writing a single poem that unifies as much of the existing Akkadian fragments as possible, and he cannot be criticized for this. If this really is a translation or if it is a modern epic poem, a rewriting of an ancient epic is entirely subjective, but the quality of this text as a poem should not be doubted. It is fast-paced, lucid, and really epic in its scope, and it deserves to be read for enjoyment.

But it is not, fundamentally, the grand story of a war, like The Iliad, or the story of a grand adventure to get home like The Odyssey or find a new home like Virgil's The Aeneid. This is something different, this is the story of a flawed man facing his own mortality. Something we will all face one day, and knowing this, who can blame Gilgamesh for going out into the wilds and looking for eternal life and a way to beat death itself. This is worth reading, not just because it is a fine book or a fine poem, but because it is a very human story about death and the terror that once we die – who will eventually care to remember us.

It is unknown if the man Gilgamesh really lived and died, the memory of his story lived on. Now, more than 3,000 years after he might have lived, we can read about him and try to understand him – and sympathize with him as he does things we wish we could but cannot. That is the power literature can have.

It is clear that this book is very much a labor of love, and a lot of intelligence and commitment has gone into the making of it. My own copy even has ancient Sumerian artwork as a frame for the text at the bottom of every page, which helps to make this poem feel like an artefact from some impossibly ancient past. Which it is, really.