top of page
Writer's pictureIrene Banks

Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse - Tablet I, Episode i

Updated: Jun 20



Book Information

Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse

David Ferry

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Copyright 1992

ISBN: 978-0-374-52383-1

 

About the Author

David Ferry was a graduate of Harvard University. He was a professor of literature at Wellesley College for almost 40 years. After retiring from teaching, he wrote ten books including translations of classical texts. His rendering of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the best modern retelling of the work. (Risen)




Overview

This is the first in a series of blog posts about David Ferry’s rendering of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Over the years, I have read three versions of the Epic, including translations by Andrew George for Penguin Classics, Stephanie Dalley for Oxford World Classics, and the version by N. K. Sandars for Penguin Classics. The George and Dalley versions are word-for-word translations from the extant cuneiform clay tablets unearthed by archaeologists. Sandars’ version is written in prose based on the word-for-word translations. In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Harold Bloom lists Ferry’s rendering as the one to read. It is written in non-rhyming heroic couplet form. According to William L. Moran in the book’s introduction, Ferry “…had given us a work of verbal art. He has thereby communicated to us some sense of the beauty of the original and some sense of the emotions that reading or hearing the original must have aroused.” (Ferry xi)


The opening couplet tells us what this story will be about:


“of him who knew the most of all men know;

who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled;” (Ferry 3)


From these two lines, we know that the story will be about a man who knew more than anyone else, and who gained that knowledge through a journey. In this journey, he set out heartbroken and came back reconciled, suggesting maturation. Because we know the story is an epic, we may surmise that the journey is a quest. And because we know that the man comes to know more than anyone else, the quest is likely a search for knowledge. Importantly, this story is about a man, not a god, and we suspect that his quest is to learn about how to live forever. For, if this were a story about a god, there would be no need for a quest, because gods are immortal.


Tablet I - Episode i

We currently have eleven clay tablets that comprise the Gilgamesh epic. Ferry first structures his poem into mini stories that equate to each tablet and then further divides it into episodes. The subject of this blog post is the first episode of Table I. This episode serves as a summary of the entire epic. Gilgamesh, part-god, part-human, builds the city of Uruk and a temple to the god Anu and goddess Ishtar. In the army, he fights against enemy cities. People are terrified of him: he has extraordinary strength and is the perfect soldier. He is a king, and for his people, he undertakes super-human feats: he opens passages through mountains and digs wells there. He goes on a journey and meets the Sumerian Noah called Utnapishtim. From him, Gilgamesh learns of his own mortality. He returns from the journey resigned to his fate and restores the shrines of the gods in Uruk. For posterity’s sake, he writes down the knowledge he has gained on lapis lazuli tablets stored in a copper chest in the temple of Anu and Ishtar.


From his nickname, Wild Ox, we sense that Gilgamesh starts adult life as a stubborn and untamed character. He is the son of a mortal king called Lugalbanda. His mother is a goddess, Ninsun – the Lady Wildcow. There is suggestive historical evidence that Gilgamesh and his father were real people. Gilgamesh seems like the epic about him. His story, like that of the Bible and the Homeric epics, straddles that crucial time in human history when oral (mythological) stories were transformed into written (historical) ones. Gilgamesh as a character is similar - he straddles that mythical period when humans and gods interacted with one another and the historical period where evidence of people and their deeds are found in the archaeological record. Much is made of his partial divinity, yet it often does not help him much. He is mortal, and while he may have extra-human strength and extra-human knowledge, these traits often cause him more trouble, not less.


From this first episode, we sense that we will learn about Gilgamesh’s maturation as a human being. This maturation contrasts with the fixed character of the gods. Why would the concept of maturation have been important to the ancient poets? And why would they choose the epic format to depict it? Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism gives us a clue. In his theory of modes, Frye discusses the thematic aspects of literature. “In thematic literature the poet may write as an individual, emphasizing the separateness of his personality and the distinctness of his vision… Or the poet may devote himself to being a spokesman of his society, which means, as he is not addressing a second society, that a poetic knowledge and expressive power which is latent or needed in his society, comes to articulation in him. Such an attitude produces poetry, which is educational in the broadest sense: epics of the more artificial or thematic kind…” (Frye 54)


By learning about Gilgamesh, his journey, and his personal growth, we will be taught an important lesson about life.


Bibliography

Ferry, David. Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.


Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1957.


Risen, Clay. David Ferry, Poet and Translator Who Won Acclaim Late in Life, Dies at 99. 11 November 2023. <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/books/david-ferry-dead.html>.

Comentarios

Obtuvo 0 de 5 estrellas.
Aún no hay calificaciones

Agrega una calificación
bottom of page