What are some other great epics such as Gilgamesh? This book has just blown my mind on so many levels

You missed Don Quixote.
I thought it was fucking interesting that the Big Deal to these ancient people in their ancient cities was Civilisation vs. Nature.

If you like those things you should definitely read Homer.

What's it about?

Really I want to know.

And it has to be YOU to tell me

Read this desu:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/11000

Make sure to wade through all of the technical text to truly appreciate the melding of stories.

>Civilisation vs. Nature
Thats what I mean though. You can find this all throughout history, theres Romanticism which recalls on the past and nature, pastoral literature, the move away from nomadic life style to a settled life style also comes up in the Bible with Able and Cain. Travel literature and the American Frontier also come to mind.

I'm currently also reading the Iliad, but its poetic style makes it harder to read than Gilgamesh.

Os Lusíadas.

Put it on the bottom of the list unless you speak portuguese, OP.

Ezra Pound wrote a bit about the epic

>You can find this all throughout history
I am a bit skeptical of this claim, since there are other cultures that did not see a divide between nature and culture.
I actually read a book some time ago that was about views of nature in history and different cultures.

I was suprised to learn that some attitudes towards nature I considered Christian, are actually Greek (the ladder of nature) or more recent fabrications (nature is something to overcome).

>some attitudes towards nature I considered Christian, are actually Greek
Any examples?

I suppose I exaggerated a bit there, but at least I found it fascinating how concerns almost 8 millennia can still be valid today

exactly.
these faggots just come here to jerk themselves off over reading something they find totally unstimulating but known to be Officially Good Literature®

I did that? The ladder of nature. Though I would have probably avoided being suprised if I wasn't so stubborn and started with the Greeks.
When I saw it I was like "Damn those Greeks again."

I think it was also dualism, which I thought was Christian as well, was also a Greek construction.

It really futher radicalised my discontent with the Greeks. I write in it in my diary desu, it is called "My struggle".

In all seriousness, the dualism and the ladder of nature came from Greeks. That's what the book said. It is called the mirror of nature and is a Dutch title.

Was also interesting that the Africans had a single creator God as well. Anthropologists first thought it was due to Christian evangelists, but later concluded that it was original. Though I found it strange how this book sort of generalized Africans, Indians and Aboriginals. Wouldn't the beliefs differ from region to region, or tribe to tribe?

The book wasn't the most extensive on the perspectives on nature, but still interesting.

It didn't answer my question if cultures believed nature to be static (as Christians would think) or more dynamic.

Tain Bo Cualinge

>its poetic style makes it harder to read than Gilgamesh.
That is either a bad translation or a result of you reading it in Greek.

There are no alternatives.

Speaking of eternal themes repeated forever: What's the best translation?

I'm reading a German version by Johann Heinrich Voß which Goethe was constantly praising in The Sorrows of Young Werther and I'm sort of regretting it because some of the stuff is going over my head.

Almost certainly a "bad" translation; probably very poetic, and very good in its own right, but not Homeric.

I have no idea about anything German, so I can't offer any specific translators, but you could look for literal poetic translations. If you're okay with reading in English, Lattimore does the best close-to-literal translation; you should be able to understand it (pirate it if you're not sure obvs).

The Lusiads if you want hipster cred for reading something nobody reads.

I know high school is hard

>I did that? The ladder of nature.
Oh, sorry. Missed that for some reason. Thanks though.

I'm what Veeky Forums would call a pleb because I read more for the content than just the style, and also because it's fun for me. I loved Gilgamesh. I liked it so much I read maybe three translations, and only one of them felt deliberately elaborate: the one I liked the most was really simple to understand.

You can divide Gilgamesh in two parts: the first part is about prince Gilgamesh meeting this wild man, Enkidu, and becoming his best friend. They fight together, they bond, and they really love one another. Things are good, and then this goddess is spurned by Gilgamesh because he'd rather have adventures with his best buddy than tie the knot with her, and so she kills Enkidu to fuck with Gil.

Gil is completely devastated by this and the second part begins, in which he realizes that people who die never come back and he'll die someday, so he sets out to look for immortality. His plan is to contact this man who lives in the underworld. In ancient time, this man survived the Flood and became immortal somehow, and Gilgamesh travels to learn his secret. The secret is that this guy became immortal as a one-time gift from the gods because of the role he played during the Flood, but no one else can ever become immortal. The guy just tells Gilgamesh to enjoy life. Instead of chasing literal immortality, he becomes a great king and becomes figuratively immortal by going down in history as an awesome guy.

The reason I liked it so much is because it's simple. Even with its constant reference to ancient gods, with a good footnote you get most of them. The ones that actually matter are usually explained in the text itself. It's clear it was meant to be a self-contained story about facing death, which is an universal theme that transcends culture and age. The way it's told doesn't presume you're familiar with the finest points of mythology and history of its setting, so it's quite accessible.

Many epics are sort of insufferably convoluted in style by default. Gilgamesh is refreshingly simple and I love it because of that.

The Song of Roland is great and it's about removing kebab

Bhagavad Gita OP.

>You can divide Gilgamesh in two parts: the first part is about prince Gilgamesh meeting this wild man, Enkidu, and becoming his best friend. They fight together, they bond, and they really love one another. Things are good, and then this goddess is spurned by Gilgamesh because he'd rather have adventures with his best buddy than tie the knot with her, and so she kills Enkidu to fuck with Gil.
code name for homosexuality

You wish, faggot

Chanson de Roland and Livy's History are pretty solid too.

> it's about removing kebab

Aaand it's bought.

Half of Beowulf is worth reading.