What is the best translation or copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh to date?

Sargon's already making a lot of money from Millennials.

Some translations are better deus sinpie?

I think he's peaked already; all his latest stuff is petty arguing with literally whos and generally being an ideologue.

All his earlier stuff is petty arguing with literally whos and generally being an ideologue.

Were Gilgamesh and Ekidnu gay for each other like Alexander the Great and Hephaestion or was it a different kind of close relationship?

They were tru bros.

no homo

I have both the Andrew George (Penguin, 1999) and the Stephanie Dalley (Oxford World's Classics, 1988) editions. I haven't read any and don't know much about the epic or its context, so I'm a bit baffled about which one I should choose (I had a third one too which seemed to be a retelling in prose, so I ditched that).

Looking at the critical apparatus alone, the Dalley seems more extensive. There are more notes and introductions and such. However, the George seems to include more texts (both have a plethora of works outside the epic itself).

What baffles me the most is the differences between the translations. I've only read the first page of each and that was enough. Here's the beginning:

Dalley:

[Of him who] found out all things, I [shall te]ll the land,
[Of him who] experienced everything, [I shall tea]ch the whole.
He searched (?) lands (?) everywhere.
He who experienced the whole gained complete wisdom.
He found out what was secret and uncovered what was hidden,
He brought back a tale of times before the Flood.

George:

He who saw the Deep, the country's foundation,
[who] knew ... , was wise in all matters!
[Gilgamesh, who] saw the Deep, the country's foundation,
[who] knew ... , was wise in all matters!

[He] ... everywhere ...
and [learnt] of everything the sum of wisdom.
He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden,
he brought back a tale of before the Deluge.

Differences in style are one thing, but here's a passage from a bit further on.

Dalley:

See its wall, which is like a copper band,
Survey its battlements, which nobody else can match,

George:

See its wall like a strand of wool,
view its parapet that none could copy!

You will agree that a copper band is something entirely different from a strand of wool. How can one translator come up with wool where another reads copper? And this is just in the first fifteen lines.

As a novice reader, I'm at a loss. Anyone who is familiar with both editions care to comment on this?

> How can one translator come up with wool where another reads copper?

There's probably just uncertainty over what that particular word actually meant and different translators choose what they think is most plausible.

Personally I recommend buying the most recent edition. 1988 is a long time ago for a work that is still being reconstructed.

There is no good translation. Sumerian is like German on steroids for not saying what it's talking about right away. So as there are no truly good English translations of Kafka, even more so there are no good translations of Gilgamesh.

That said there are some German translations.

stephen mitchell's is really good because it doesn't pretend to be a scholarly and accurate translation, which is pretty impossible. instead it's a beautiful and readable story derived from the tablets and it's far more worthwhile as a work of literature than the dry pedantic fractured penguin edition

In Sumerian one symbol can have multiple interpretations and pronunciations, and even where you know the word it can mean multiple things. So for example, the symbol KA can mean mouth, nose, tooth, to speak, word, sound... so if it's clear that something is being said about a part of the head it may be that the tooth is being talked about rather than the nose (or it may be ambiguous). Because they used rebus writing sometimes and had a lot of homophony you also get some symbols standing in for the sound that mean something else like TI for arrow meaning life.

Wool might have had something to do with copper. I know ancient peoples used sheepskins to pan for gold so that may be a connection.

The anime. It has a trap with robot limbs.

I see. That leaves so much to the arbitrary that I'll never be sure what I'm reading is what was meant. I'm too dumb to learn Sumerian fast just to read this and I'm too old to learn it slowly.

So, all in all, which would you knowledgeable anons pick out of the two above, or any other?

Based on style alone I would pick George. But he seems to infer more out of what is probably a very lacunary text (the Deep, country's foundation), whereas Dalley seems more conservative. What if George is making shit up? But what if Dalley is being too terse and is missing the poetry?

At this point one of you should tell me to just stfu and read something.

What's a good German translation of the Gilgamesch Epos?

Go with Dalley. You're going to see a LOT of '( )' and '{ }'. This didn't bother me all too much though, as at least you know the translator isn't just "filling in the blanks". One has to remember that the originals - or contemporary copies of this text, are all moderately damaged for the most part, and that in some cases you're going to have sections in the translation where youre missing 40+ lines of text. This is due to erosion, cracks, broken tablets, etc.

Dalley is best imo, as there is no effort to make the texts more aesthetically pleasing - no forces metre, and no overly modernised vocabulary for the most part. The Dalley edition youre referring to also makes use of different extant Gilgamesh texts to fill in known gaps in the Sumerian cuneiform. You'll see 'OBV' in the margin sometimes, meaning: Old Babylonian Version.

Go with Dalley, stay the fuck away from prose translations, and keep in mind that our understanding of Sumerian is very limited, as it is a language isolate, and also because we have so few portions of text, in comparison to other older languages like Latin, and Greek.

TLDR: Go with Dalley out of those two you mentioned.

But he makes the prostitute an actual character and makes Ishtar say "I'll suck your rod" and he leaves out gilgamesh's death.

Thanks for the spoiler you fucking retard

>inb4 you had 4000 years to read it

I have dalley. I wasn't sure which one to get but oxford is usually pretty thorough even though I hate the quality of the actual books.

I found it hard to get anything out of the creation story in her Myths of Mesopotamia. I had to read over it again and again to make sense. The broken lines and missing fragments don't help either, but that is just the nature of ancient texts. It has put me off form reading Gilgamesh for now, though it's still on my nightstand.

Thank you very much, godlike user.