the epic of gilgamesh benjamin r. foster pdf

Gardner, by the way, was very fond of the Sandars translation, and perturbed to find that its final section didn't belong to the Akkadian tradition. I haven't been able to call this up on Goodreads: for a Kindle edition, with a misleadingly recent date, see. It mainly relied on on the 'Standard Babylonian Version,' attributed to a perhaps legendary scribe, although it includes material from other versions in the notes. Īfter these three, a couple of other available translations are worthy of note.Ī fairly scholarly, but older, translation, is 'Gilgamesh: Translated from the Sin-leqi-unninni version,' a 1984 collaboration between the novelist John Gardner and the cuneiformist John Maier. The Epic of Gilgamesh The translation has been reprinted by Norton in other formats, such as their 'Anthology of World Literature.'įoster's translation is NOT included in a massive compendium by Foster, from another publisher, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, which does include much of the material in Dalley's collection, as well as other genres (prayers, wisdom literature, etc.) I reviewed it for Amazon some years ago: see. Foster's Norton Critical Edition, from 2000 (or 2001 - sources vary). As the title indicates, it contains a great deal more than just 'Gilgamesh.'Īnother volume with supplemental material is Benjamin R. It is probably a bit out-of-date already, but it is considered very reliable.Īnother option is Stephanie Dalley's Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, from 1989, but revised in 2000. This appeared in 1999, and my copy indicates that there were updatings in 2003: there may have been later changes. Much more up-to-date than Sandars, in terms of available texts and knowledge of the ancient languages involved, is another Penguin Classic translation, by Andrew George, who had also edited the modern edition of the Akkadian texts: The Epic of Gilgamesh: the Babylonian epic poem and other texts in Akkadian and Sumerian I'll mention first of all three translations that are about twenty years old, but still valuable. I'm going to leave them aside (but not mentioning a translation doesn't mean I have such objections to it - it is hard to keep track of all of them, and I'm not pretending that I have comprehensive knowledge of what is available). There are also a lot of Kindle and other reprints of very early translations, which are quite unreliable as well as being very incomplete. There are a whole bunch of competing translations, many of which seem to be re-writings of existing translations into modern languages, rather than direct confrontations with the Akkadian and Sumerian texts.

Sandars even includes a piece of the Sumerian Gilgamesh literature, which does not belong to the Semitic (Assyro-Babylonian, or more simply Akkadian) texts that are the main source, a fact which can confuse those who don't read Sandars' explanations of what is going on. There were several versions in antiquity, from different times and places, and none of them has survived in really complete form, so translations are frequently like jigsaw puzzles, but with pieces from perhaps slightly different versions of the same picture. Sandars translation from Penguin Classics has introduced what must be generations of college students (and others) to the ancient story, but it hasn't been updated in quite some time (the latest I've seen is from 1987), and its eclectic text, seamlessly weaving together fragments from different periods, gives a misleading impression of how much of the epic we actually have.

The epic of gilgamesh benjamin r. foster pdf