Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse
Nov 2014 · Macmillan + ORM
star
2 reviews
Ebook
110
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
"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
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
This is a new verse rendering of the great epic of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the oldest works in Western literature. Ferry makes Gilgamesh available in the kind of energetic and readable translation that Robert Fitzgerald and Richard Lattimore have provided for readers in their translations of Homer and Virgil, and "brings a fresh interpretation to [its] power" (John Ray, The Times Literary Supplement).
"Captures the elegiac and ironic undertones of Gilgamesh's failed search for immortality. One senses that [Ferry] has restored the poetry of this oldest epic." — Publishers Weekly
"Like Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat or Ezra Pound's Cathay, Mr. Ferry's Gilgamesh is a miraculous transformation of [the] original into his own, utterly distinctive idiom . . . [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
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
This is a new verse rendering of the great epic of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the oldest works in Western literature. Ferry makes Gilgamesh available in the kind of energetic and readable translation that Robert Fitzgerald and Richard Lattimore have provided for readers in their translations of Homer and Virgil, and "brings a fresh interpretation to [its] power" (John Ray, The Times Literary Supplement).
"Captures the elegiac and ironic undertones of Gilgamesh's failed search for immortality. One senses that [Ferry] has restored the poetry of this oldest epic." — Publishers Weekly
"Like Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat or Ezra Pound's Cathay, Mr. Ferry's Gilgamesh is a miraculous transformation of [the] original into his own, utterly distinctive idiom . . . [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
"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
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
This is a new verse rendering of the great epic of anc...
Ratings and reviews
2 reviews
Eric Burgess
- Flag inappropriate
January 12, 2026
I would like to read more books like this one.
About the author
David Ferry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for his translation of Gilgamesh in 1992, has translated The Odes of Horace, The Eclogues of Virgil, and the Epistles of Horace. For Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations he won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, given by the Library of Congress. In 2001 he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2002 he won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. He is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College.
David Ferry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for his translation of Gilgamesh in 1992, has translated The Odes of Horace, The Eclogues of Virgil, and the Epistles of Horace. For Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations he won the Lenore Marshal...
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
