#anyway good luck anon and happy reading. please come back to my inbox when you're done.

[appleebees]

Do you have any gilgamesh translation recs for a beginner? Or like pros and cons of some?

woah hi whoever you are I love you... please go read Sophus Helle's 2021 translation*. It's incredible, and very accessible if you haven't tackled the text before. And like $16.

I'll drop some thoughts and notes below that might be helpful:

The most famous translation is probably Andrew George's, but if you have a book of Mesopotamian myths you might've encountered Stephanie Dalley. They're all good, but there's a few things that set Helle's version apart.

As we have it today, the text consists of fragments in different languages. This means we have giant gaps in the text (and smaller gaps of individual words or phrases).

Translators will generally guess at the smaller gaps and place the guesses [in brackets, like so]. This is cool, but it clutters the text. Larger gaps tend to be noted like [gap of 26 lines] or [the text resumes]. Again, this clutters the text, and makes it very hard to visualize what's gone.

Helle a) does not note when he's guessing at a word and b) uses interpuncts for larger gaps. So the text looks like this:

Here's an example line

· ·

And that was a missing line

It's way easier to read, and WAY easier to visualize just how much is missing. I think that alone makes it more approachable.

Helle also includes a foreword with some wonderful notes on both history and the translation process. These are super helpful for situating the original text and his translation in context, and again, really good for a newcomer. Plus, there's a bunch of essays at the end, and those are great reads as well.

*You asked for translation: however, the easiest possible entry point to the text is probably Stephen Mitchell's adaptation. It's a sorta condensed version of the story: he cuts some of the repetitive sections, assigns clarity to narrators, and fills in the gaps in text. It's a very easy read, and if you're just looking for the story, Mitchell's adaptation is quite good. I actually really like some of his additions, he's quite a skilled poet.

That being said, I think it's important to understand Mitchell's methodology before going in: he doesn't understand Akkadian, so the text is derived from other translations. This means that when he changes things, it's with respect to those other translations and not an understanding of the actual text. This isn't actually a problem because it's an adaptation and not a translation, but I think all readers should understand their relationship with any given translated work before going in, and Mitchell's version is no exception.