Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse [Paperback]

A new verse rendering of the great epic of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the oldest works in Western Literature. Ferry makesGilgameshavailable in the kind of energetic and readable translation that Robert Fitzgerald and Richard Lattimore have provided for.

Ferry's version [ofGilgameshwill] become the standard English text. Fred Marchant, The Harvard Review

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

Ferry's skill brings a fresh interpretation to the power ofGilgamesh. John Ray, The Times Literary Supplement

Ferry'sGilgameshis uniquely his own, self-contained in holding aloof from fads and hype. No display of adjectival fireworks could do justice to his poem's originality or to the integrity of the poet's formal invention. In identifying the poem as Mr. Ferry's, I mean no disrespect to Sin-leqe-unninni, the ancient poet-editor that Babylonian tradition credits as having developed to their highest form the epic adventures of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, and his companion, Enkidu. But like Edward Fitzgerald'sRubaiyator Ezra Pound'sCathay, Mr. Ferry'sGilgameshis a miraculous transformation of his original into his own, utterly distinctive idiom . . . Perhaps the poem's most moving element is how the desire for fame is superseded, after the death of Enkidu, by a quest that touches every reader, ancient or modern. . . the wish for physical immortality . . . [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

The Gilgamesh epic . . . came to light again in the mid-19th century and, thanks to the labors of an arduous, exacting philology, slowly began to assume its place as one of the great ló'