Gilgamesh : epic of old Babylonia

'Older by many centuries than any other great poem in the world, its lyriics already embrace the central themes of almost all subsequent poetry: sex-love, combat, adventure, friendship, valor, loyalty, the mountain, the field, the forest, the wild beasts, the sea, the storm, the gods, the mystery of birth and death. Here too we find, more than a thousand years before the writing of Genesis, the Semitic folk-tales of the flood and the tree of life and the evil serpent. The poet William Ellery Leonard has rendered this ancient masterpiece into English verse, made it available to modern readers for the first time in its true spirit. In his sensitively attuned free-verse, it becomes something much more than an archaeological curiosity....'

Hardcover