Simon Armitage’s verse translation retells the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, the powerful king of Uruk, and Enkidu, the wild man made to challenge him. After becoming companions, they battle Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, and the Bull of Heaven; when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh undertakes a lonely search for immortality. The story’s concerns feel strikingly current: royal abuse of power, sex work, physical love between men, environmental destruction and conflict over natural resources. The clash with Humbaba, whose forest is felled for its timber, resonates with modern wars fought in the same region for oil.
Armitage turns a poem preserved in damaged, incomplete tablets into a cohesive, readable narrative, while acknowledging missing material through occasional gaps, prose passages and explanatory notes. His regular four-beat lines, alliteration and insistent repetitions lend the translation an archaic force without resorting to rhyme. The language moves between ceremonious and bluntly contemporary, matching the epic’s grandeur, violence and sexual frankness; vivid descriptions of the forest and sensuous details elsewhere show the translation’s particular poetic strength. The reviewer argues that this combination of scholarship, energy and varied voice makes the version a tour de force and a likely standard in English. Its smoothness may disappoint readers who regard the poem’s broken form as essential, and continuing discoveries mean no translation can settle the epic permanently.
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