It was also interesting learning about the role of Poet Laureate, and the stipend. £5,750 per annum, and a barrel of Sherry; the latter being a tradition since 1630.
I love these small slivers of old traditions that are kept up into the modern day.
However, I do not like that it, like most other comments that provide only partial information about Gilgamesh, fails to mention some details that I consider culturally relevant.
For instance, it lists only 3 benefits of civilization with which the wild man is lured to leave his former life: professional women, eating bread & drinking beer.
I fact, the Gilgamesh epic lists 4 benefits of civilization, the 4th being the pleasure of being massaged with oil (apparently sesame oil is meant, presumably flavored).
In the antiquity, vegetable oil had only a minor role as food, its principal application was for massage, normally as perfumed oil. Massage with oil was a very widespread practice, even among the relatively poor.
The technologies of oil extraction, of milling flour, of making bread and of making beer by fermentation, were indeed major advantages of the settled people living on agriculture, in comparison with hunter-gatherers.
Most comments about Gilgamesh list only the first 3 benefits of civilization, because those are the most easy to understand for modern readers. Massage with oil is much less used today, so many modern readers do not realize that by the time of Gilgamesh (and also millennia later, e.g. in the Roman Empire, where it was still the main use of olive oil) it was considered a pleasure as important as eating and drinking.
The ancient authors are quite explicit that the "massage oil" is for external use, not for internal use, so the massage oil did not contain drugs, even if, when used by rich people, it typically included some strong perfume.
For example Pliny the Elder says this at the transition between book 14 (on vines and wine) and book 15 (on olive trees and olive oil):
"There are two liquids that are specially agreeable to the human body, wine inside and oil outside, both of them the most excellent of all the products of the tree class"
A rather similar description is given in Gilgamesh when comparing the pleasures of drinking beer and being massaged with oil, except that the plants that provided alcohol and oil are different, barley instead of grapevines and sesame instead of olive trees.
Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is exceptional, much better IMO than the Tolkien translation. So I'm very excited for this.
The audio performance of it by Bill Wallis is also a family favorite:
One isn't well served by something that old. Our knowledge of Akkadian (and the Sumerian predeccesor) has improved since the early twentieth century, as your very link notes. Some Akkadian hapaxes in Gilgamesh that baffled early translators can now be read on the basis of comparative Semitic or other work.
If you want a free translation online of a great work of literature, you don't have to limit yourself to old public-domain stuff. The shadow libraries will have more recent editions.
no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian in any of the reviews, and the truely epic and laudable journey that is bieng replaced by the sleezy term 'verse translation', ie : hollywood sceen play ready, as that is what could be the most that can be expected from a former probation officer turned the official british royal panegrist.
edit: the songs of innana and other older actual translations of gilgamesh are there for some little peeks into the sumerian world that continues to define ours in so many subtle ways.
edit, edit: before commenting I did a fairly decent search for any details on this 'book' , of which nothing that I found written in plain text offered anything other than the standard devious prevercations found when some politico/legalistic thing is bieng floated.
And I can state with absolute certitude that this 'translation/rewrite' of Gilgamesh will not age well even in the tiny demographic it is aimed at and will go further out on the limb and suggest that this 'work' will soon be evaluated and found to contain certain 'isms' from some of the one name only agregators of our literary present.
> no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian
There are Sumerian Gilgamesh stories, but The Epic everyone reads is a redaction by the scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni of earlier works by and written in Standard Babylonian (Akkadian), not Sumerian.
> as that is what could be the most that can be expected from a former probation officer turned the official british royal panegrist.
In a Britain where it’s harder than it has been for fifty years to be from a working/middle-class background and make it in the arts, I think it’s great that a polytechnic graduate, former probation officer is the poet laureate.
> no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian in any of the reviews
He states very clearly in his introduction what the scope is, how it's being translated and the problems with both translating ancient text from unfamiliar cultures and translating a work that's only partially complete and how he's approached both issues
Loads of "translators" not trained in the original language have written Introductions where they state such things. That doesn't mean their defense of their enterprise holds water. There are a few translations out there by Armitage's forebears that ought to be seen purely as representative of their own poetry instead of an actual translation of a classic work.
Still, one has to give a pseudotranslator credit for admitting their method, unlike in famous cases like Stephen Mitchell or Coleman Barks where the edition doesn't even note that the supposed translator has no background in the field.
A significant portion of the English canon of verse doesn't rhyme, from most of Shakespeare to Milton (the latter who called rhyme "the invention of a barbarous age"), from the Anglo-Saxon era all the way to the twentieth century.
That is not universally true at all. For example, Milton's Paradise Lost, or much of Shakespeare. There are countless other examples of blank verse in English.
I love these small slivers of old traditions that are kept up into the modern day.
If that's the original stipend value, it shows that poets were well appreciated.
1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poet_Laureate_of_the_United_Ki...
2: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...
£5,750 in the 1950s would be £177,606.06 today according to the same BoE calculator. 4.58% annual inflation, higher than I expected...
Recommended reading for anyone interested in knowing more about the work.
However, I do not like that it, like most other comments that provide only partial information about Gilgamesh, fails to mention some details that I consider culturally relevant.
For instance, it lists only 3 benefits of civilization with which the wild man is lured to leave his former life: professional women, eating bread & drinking beer.
I fact, the Gilgamesh epic lists 4 benefits of civilization, the 4th being the pleasure of being massaged with oil (apparently sesame oil is meant, presumably flavored).
In the antiquity, vegetable oil had only a minor role as food, its principal application was for massage, normally as perfumed oil. Massage with oil was a very widespread practice, even among the relatively poor.
The technologies of oil extraction, of milling flour, of making bread and of making beer by fermentation, were indeed major advantages of the settled people living on agriculture, in comparison with hunter-gatherers.
Most comments about Gilgamesh list only the first 3 benefits of civilization, because those are the most easy to understand for modern readers. Massage with oil is much less used today, so many modern readers do not realize that by the time of Gilgamesh (and also millennia later, e.g. in the Roman Empire, where it was still the main use of olive oil) it was considered a pleasure as important as eating and drinking.
Well, as a modern reader, I take 'massage oil' to be Opoids.
For example Pliny the Elder says this at the transition between book 14 (on vines and wine) and book 15 (on olive trees and olive oil):
"There are two liquids that are specially agreeable to the human body, wine inside and oil outside, both of them the most excellent of all the products of the tree class"
A rather similar description is given in Gilgamesh when comparing the pleasures of drinking beer and being massaged with oil, except that the plants that provided alcohol and oil are different, barley instead of grapevines and sesame instead of olive trees.
The audio performance of it by Bill Wallis is also a family favorite:
https://www.audible.com/pd/Sir-Gawain-and-the-Green-Knight-A...
https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/epic-of-gilgamesh-ebook.htm...
If you want a free translation online of a great work of literature, you don't have to limit yourself to old public-domain stuff. The shadow libraries will have more recent editions.
Even better, hear it read in a Public Domain audiobook on LibriVox: https://librivox.org/epic-of-gilgamesh-by-e-a-wallis-budge/
https://sophushelle.com/gilgamesh/?amp=1
edit: the songs of innana and other older actual translations of gilgamesh are there for some little peeks into the sumerian world that continues to define ours in so many subtle ways.
edit, edit: before commenting I did a fairly decent search for any details on this 'book' , of which nothing that I found written in plain text offered anything other than the standard devious prevercations found when some politico/legalistic thing is bieng floated. And I can state with absolute certitude that this 'translation/rewrite' of Gilgamesh will not age well even in the tiny demographic it is aimed at and will go further out on the limb and suggest that this 'work' will soon be evaluated and found to contain certain 'isms' from some of the one name only agregators of our literary present.
There are Sumerian Gilgamesh stories, but The Epic everyone reads is a redaction by the scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni of earlier works by and written in Standard Babylonian (Akkadian), not Sumerian.
In a Britain where it’s harder than it has been for fifty years to be from a working/middle-class background and make it in the arts, I think it’s great that a polytechnic graduate, former probation officer is the poet laureate.
He states very clearly in his introduction what the scope is, how it's being translated and the problems with both translating ancient text from unfamiliar cultures and translating a work that's only partially complete and how he's approached both issues
Still, one has to give a pseudotranslator credit for admitting their method, unlike in famous cases like Stephen Mitchell or Coleman Barks where the edition doesn't even note that the supposed translator has no background in the field.
The entire cultural context of that society and work is gone and we have but a few shards thereof.
No rhyme in the original doesn't mean there should be no rhyme in the English. Akkadian and English are different languages. English verse rhymes.
That is not universally true at all. For example, Milton's Paradise Lost, or much of Shakespeare. There are countless other examples of blank verse in English.
What mattered was the periodicity of rhythm, i.e. the periodicity of intonation patterns, stress patterns and length patterns, similarly as for music.