In his Introduction and a couple of preliminary chapters, he sketches out the historical background to the poem and the details of its discovery, praising the heroic efforts of the philologists who managed to decipher the cuneiform script and the two linguistically unrelated languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, in which the various fragments of the poem are written. At one point, we learn that Schmidt himself was introduced to the poem in a religious studies class at school, where he first read the famous story of Uta-napishti and the Flood – an episode which sent shock waves through the world of biblical studies – and that later, at university, he became obsessed with the full text when he read it as an aspiring poet. One of the many fascinating aspects of this book is that Schmidt, uniquely placed as one of the foremost publishers of poetry in the English-speaking world, canvassed fifty poets in order to discover what Gilgamesh has meant to them, how they first came across it, and whether it has informed their own work. However, Gilgamesh, the Life of a Poem, is, as we shall see, far more than a mere layman’s guide to a long-lost and seemingly obscure literary text. He has now gone one step further by writing his own comprehensive introduction to the poem. As a publisher, Michael Schmidt deserves credit for having published, in 2018, Gilgamesh Retold by Jenny Lewis, one of the most readable and skilfully reconstructed versions of this foundational text. Subsequently, further scattered fragments have been found. Yet it only came to our attention when archaeologists discovered it on a set of twelve very damaged clay tablets in 1853. It predates the Iliad and the oldest biblical texts, both of which it may have influenced, by a thousand years or more, though its origins go back even further to a long-established oral tradition. The long poem known as Gilgamesh or the Epic of Gilgamesh is the most ancient literary text we have and the earliest surviving work of literature that has the power to move and inspire us. Michael Schmidt | Gilgamesh, the Life of a Poem | Princeton University Press: £22.00
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