Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh is a wonderful version. It is as eloquent and nuanced as his translations of Rilke. This is certainly the best that I have seen in English. —Harold Bloom

Reading Stephen Mitchell’s marvelously clear and vivid rendering makes me feel that I am encountering Gilgamesh for the first time. —Elaine Pagels,  Harrington Professor of Religion, Princeton University, author of The Gnostic Gospels

“It was a revelation. The translation is superb.” —Harold Pinter

Here is the wisdom and lyrical beauty of yore rendered, offered us anew, by a distinguished, ever-so-knowing translator and poet who has given so many of us a wondrous education these past years.  Mitchell connects us to treasures of the past brought alive by his broad and dee p sensibility. —Robert Coles, James Agee Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University

Stephen Mitchell’s fresh new rendition of mankind’s oldest recorded myth is quite wonderful in its limpidity and the immediacy of its live emotions. —Peter Matthiessen, author of At Play in the Fields of the Lord and The Snow Leopard

Freshly rendered by translator Mitchell, this ancient tale of a cocky ruler’s collision with his own mortality is beautifully retold and a page-turner in the bargain. Like Seamus Heaney’s recent retelling of Beowulf, this book proves that in the right hands, no great story ever grows stale. —Newsweek

A very readable version in stately verse, printed in a beautiful format…. Mitchell’s version can be warmly recommended. He retains just enough of the strangeness of the original and its robust imagery to capture its essence, and by smoothing the fragments into a coherent narrative he highlights the work’s essential themes. —Washington Post

Here is a flowing, unbroken version that reads as effortlessly as a novel, where despite the alien landscape of gods and monsters we can discover startlingly familiar hopes, fears and lusts. To Mitchell, who for years has reinvented canonical texts of world literature with an intrepid vigor befitting his hero, this is precisely the point. He believes literary greatness rests in what texts can teach us about ourselves, and he cracks open the lessons in Gilgamesh by rebuilding its clay fragments into a poem easy on the eyes and the transcultural imagination… The result is a quintessentially American version of the ancient Mesopotamian narrative—vibrant, earnest, unfussily accessible…. The muscular eloquence and rousing simplicity of Mitchell’s four-beat line effectively unleash the grand vehemence of the epic’s battle scenes, and the characters’ ominous visions emerge with uncanny clarity. —New York Times Book Review

Seamus Heaney isn’t the only one intent on making the classics relevant to our times. Stephen Mitchell… offers a limpid retelling of this story about absolute power…. An ancient story’s true relevance to one’s times, Mitchell’s version suggests, resides most in having its message of love, loss and endurance rendered in fresh, forceful language. —Los Angeles Times

[Mitchell’s verse] propels the reader along through the subtle, muscular music of its rhythms. The language is spare, sinuous, pellucid and often striking. For the reader who wishes to breathe in the spirit of this epic, to relate to it as a work of literature rather than to interpret it as a series of fragments recording some distant legend, Mitchell produces what should become recognised as the standard text. Read it and sense all the wisdom and complexity of the original… Let it settle down into your imaginative depths. —The Times (London)

As fast-paced and thrilling as a contemporary action film… This wonderful new version of the story of Gilgamesh shows how the story came to achieve literary immortality—not because it is a rare ancient artifact, but because reading it can make people in the here and now feel more completely alive. —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Utterly enthralling reading, thanks to Mr. Mitchell’s skill and flair in recasting the ancient text. —New York Sun

Since its discovery, the 3,500-years-old Mesopotamian saga has been rendered into English countless times. Not until now, however, has it found a translation capable of evoking its great power—a translation vigorous in its narration, translucent in its poetry, and incisive in its depiction of our clever, struggling, frail humanity. Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh is a masterpiece of storytelling, or re-telling. —Jack Meinhardt, Archeology Odyssey

For some readers, this story has been about loss and grief; for others, the nature of friendship; for still others, imperialism and hubris. In Mitchell’s version, each of the great themes is present and crucial, but it’s the language--gorgeous, dramatic, laden with objects--that is most striking… Mitchell’s version of the epic is beautifully written and dramatic. —Austin American Statesman

Passion, violence, remorse, guilt, retribution, fateful moral choices, moments of comic relief: they’re all here in this spirited and wonderfully readable retelling of what Mitchell notes is “the oldest story in the world.” —San Jose Mercury News

Remarkable: a rendition that, while taking no great liberties with the text, somehow makes it available as a work of literature, rather than as a set of fragments from a vanished cosmology…. The lines of verse move swiftly, gracefully, yet never indulge in any misbegotten effort to sound poetic; the diction is simple and clean, evoking the sense of a time when the world was new and first being named. Reading this Gilgamesh gave me a sense, for the first time, of understanding Rilke’s devotion to the poem. —Newsday

With this eminently readable adaptation, respectful as it is of the original material and also the intelligence of his readers, Mitchell makes one of humanity’s oldest and greatest stories accessible to a general audience. Henceforth, no person can consider himself or herself to be fully educated without having read, in addition to the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare, this oddly humane and curiously modern story. —Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

Mitchell has done a superb job of filling in gaps and sustaining the flow while staying true to the vision of the original scribe. —Dayton Daily News

As narrative verse, this Gilgamesh gently entrances and enthralls. Its liquid, intimate four-stressed lines … negotiate the rapid shifts between everyday pleasures, heroic feats and blazing visions in this mythic world where the sensual and spiritual always intersect. Mitchell manages to slip the mesmerising incantations of the verse … into his reader’s bloodstream. —The Independent (London)

Mitchell brings a lucid and poetic version of Gilgamesh to a literary rather than academic audience. —The Observer (London)

A powerful translation of an eerie and unsettling ancient epic… This is the most pellucid version of the epic yet to have been written in English, but what is most startling and admirable about it is the fact that Mitchell has not sacrificed a sense of the weird on the altar of readability. —The Daily Telegraph (London)

The mysterious, sinewy surge of his verse [is] thoroughly modern, yet, in its formulaic repetitions and unfamiliar meter, an uncanny evocation of the primeval. —Boston Globe

Stephen Mitchell, the noted translator of many of the world’s seminal spiritual texts, has reached back to ancient Mesopotamia to bring out a version of the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh epic, literature’s first hero story, that speaks to modern times. —San Francisco Chronicle

Mitchell’s translation is easily the most readable, and the copious notes provide enough detail to allow the intrigued reader (and you will be) to learn more. —The Scotsman

Mitchell's version of Gilgamesh… clips along like an action novel. With its contemporary language and modernized narrative, it would find enthusiastic readers even among those who have no interest in classic literature. —Baltimore City Paper

Mitchell conveys the emotion of the drama to the modern reader with pace and energy in a version that is flawlessly readable. —The Liverpool Daily Post & Echo

Stephen Mitchell’s new rendition of Gilgamesh has taken the U.S. literary world by storm… A seamlessly graceful and engaging poem.
—Harry Smith, Confrontation