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Gilgamesh

Donald

I love David Ferry. His Horace translations are amazing. This is not a translation (Ferry doesn't know Akkadian or Cuneiform) but a reworking of several literal, scholarly translations into unrhyming iambic pentameter couplets.

I read this because several people have recently told me that Gilgamesh rivals both the Hebrew Bible and Homer. Gilgamesh is great, but it's not comparable to Homer or the Bible. I don't think these people have really read any of the three; they just want to celebrate a "non-Western" text. But the category "Western" (much like "European" or "White") doesn't make any sense when applied to an ancient text. Those concepts didn't exist back then. Certainly, there's much to say about overlaps between Gilgamesh and Biblical stories (Noah in particular).

Ferry writes Gilgamesh and Enkidu as lovers, which is interesting. I wonder if that's the case in the original.

Gilgamesh

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