no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian in any of the reviews, and the truely epic and laudable journey that is bieng replaced by the sleezy term 'verse translation', ie : hollywood sceen play ready, as that is what could be the most that can be expected from a former probation officer turned the official british royal panegrist.

edit: the songs of innana and other older actual translations of gilgamesh are there for some little peeks into the sumerian world that continues to define ours in so many subtle ways.

edit, edit: before commenting I did a fairly decent search for any details on this 'book' , of which nothing that I found written in plain text offered anything other than the standard devious prevercations found when some politico/legalistic thing is bieng floated. And I can state with absolute certitude that this 'translation/rewrite' of Gilgamesh will not age well even in the tiny demographic it is aimed at and will go further out on the limb and suggest that this 'work' will soon be evaluated and found to contain certain 'isms' from some of the one name only agregators of our literary present.

It looks like he has not studied any Akkadian. He is apparently reliant on glosses by Assyriologist Jacob Dahl and presumably other translations.

From the introduction:

> Benjamin R. Foster, another esteemed academic author who has made significant contributions to the study and translation of the poem, [...] says, “I have no patience with clueless folk who think they can translate the epic without going to the trouble of mastering Babylonian.” This is a disheartening and discouraging comment. Are we really to accept that satisfactory transmissions of the Gilgamesh story rest entirely in the hands of professionals in the subject of Assyriology, or that the poem is located behind some kind of intellectual force field, or that those of us outside the inner circle must leave such profound work to the fellowship? And what of the counter argument: that the job of translating poetry cannot be fully realized by professors, only by poets?

> Echoing George and Foster to some extent, Michael Schmidt comments, “Interlopers achieve mixed results among the dead languages of the world.” Am I one such interloper, trespassing on hallowed ground? My approach to Gilgamesh has been the same as for my medieval translations, with the hope of producing critically informed work that speaks to the widest readership, attempting to balance linguistic and historical frameworks against literary expectations of the present day. The difference this time is that like almost everyone else on the planet I have no comprehension of Akkadian or other languages of the period, and for his thorough and no-nonsense translations of the cuneiform scripts I am indebted to Jacob L. Dahl, professor of Assyriology and fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, who provided me with the literals to work from. Jacob also answered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of my questions, some of them well below his pay grade, and stuck to the task for three or four more years beyond my wildly optimistic timeframe. I am enormously grateful to Jacob, for being a medium between this world and the world of the long dead, and for help in bringing them back to life. Any errors of judgment or rogue deviations between the files he submitted to me and the publication of this book are entirely of my making.

> as that is what could be the most that can be expected from a former probation officer turned the official british royal panegrist.

In a Britain where it’s harder than it has been for fifty years to be from a working/middle-class background and make it in the arts, I think it’s great that a polytechnic graduate, former probation officer is the poet laureate.

> no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian in any of the reviews

He states very clearly in his introduction what the scope is, how it's being translated and the problems with both translating ancient text from unfamiliar cultures and translating a work that's only partially complete and how he's approached both issues

> no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian

There are Sumerian Gilgamesh stories, but The Epic everyone reads is a redaction by the scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni of earlier works written in Standard Babylonian (Akkadian), not Sumerian.

> bieng

I'm quite used to native english speakers putting e and i in random order. I understand because 'weird' is more or less pronounced like you would pronounce 'wierd' and english spelling is rather haphazard anyway. But 'bieng' is a a first . Please note, I'm not blaming you! I make plenty of mistakes myself and english spelling is weird. I'm just curious if you are a native english speaker or not?

I have a theory that for (esl) people that have different sounding ei and ie in their native language, this particular part of english spelling is actually easier than for native english speakers.

My guess is that you have english as a second language, because being (be-ing) is pronounced differently than other ei words and a native speaker would probably not write bi-eng ... was I correct?