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Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
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Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem

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Reflections on a lost poem and its rediscovery by contemporary poets

Gilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist. It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it tells the story of a great king, his heroism, and his eventual defeat. It is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Acclaimed literary historian Michael Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today.

Schmidt describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis. Fragments of the poem, incised on clay tablets, were scattered across a huge expanse of desert when it was recovered in the nineteenth century. The poem had to be reassembled, its languages deciphered. The discovery of a pre-Noah flood story was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, and the poem's allure only continues to grow as additional cuneiform tablets come to light. Its translation, interpretation, and integration are ongoing.

In this illuminating book, Schmidt discusses the special fascination Gilgamesh holds for contemporary poets, arguing that part of its appeal is its captivating otherness. He reflects on the work of leading poets such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose own encounters with the poem are revelatory, and he reads its many translations and editions to bring it vividly to life for readers.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 24, 2019
ISBN9780691196992
Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
Author

Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt is an award-winning, best-selling African non-fiction author with six books published and another four in the pipeline. With a career spanning 35 years, he is the author of several monographs and innumerable journal and newspaper articles, with a focus on global subaltern (especially anarchist movement) history and politics, human rights, artistic freeddoms and transitional justice, and African affairs including in the military, space tech, and maritime environments. His last book, Death Flight: Apartheid's Secret Doctrine of Disappearance (Tafelberg, Cape Town, 2020), detailed for the first time the operations over 1979-1987 of an ultra-secret Special Forces unit which murdered hundreds of anti-apartheid detainees and dumped their bodies in the ocean from light aircraft, Argentine-style. He is a 2009 Fellow of the Academic Leaders’ Programme at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, a 2011 Fellow of the International Institute for Journalism (IIJ), Germany (since absorbed into the Deutsche Welle Akademie), a 2011 Clive Menell Media Fellow at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University, USA, and a 2017 Fellow of the inaugural Arts Rights Justice Academy (ARJA) at Universität Hildesheim, Germany.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read this book before reading each part of Chapter 1 of the Andrew George translation. It would be better to read this after reading the whole, excellent, Andrew George book. And then read Damrosch on the Buried Book. All three books add to the appreciation of this amazing literature.

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Gilgamesh - Michael Schmidt

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