The Epic of Gilgamesh

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Nicholas19
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Post by Nicholas19 »

This appears to be Langdon's 1917 translation at Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18897

And at Internet Archive:

http://www.archive.org/details/theepicofgilgami18897gut

And this is the 1920 translation by Budge:

http://www.archive.org/details/babylonianstoryo00brituoft

So, it should be okay for someone to take up one or both of these translations.
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Steampunk
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Post by Steampunk »

Nicholas19 wrote:This appears to be Langdon's 1917 translation at Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18897

And at Internet Archive:

http://www.archive.org/details/theepicofgilgami18897gut

And this is the 1920 translation by Budge:

http://www.archive.org/details/babylonianstoryo00brituoft

So, it should be okay for someone to take up one or both of these translations.
Both of these are scholarly works on the epic and other Babylonian works, with some transliteration, but neither contain more than fragments of the epic itself.

But, yes, both are PD and recordable.


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Nicholas19
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Post by Nicholas19 »

I don't know how much is included in modern translations, but on the Wikipedia article, it says the epic is incomplete anyway.

Does anyone know how these translations compare with the modern ones and whether the modern ones include more of the story? I know there are several versions of the epic.

Interestingly, on the Wikipedia article it says the earliest translation was in 1880 by George Smith, though I haven't found that translation listed in library catalogues I've seen so far.
Nicholas J. Bridgewater

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MARTIN GEESON
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Post by MARTIN GEESON »

Nicholas19 wrote:I was just looking through my University library today and came upon a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh published in 1917, so it would be PD. I'm not sure if this version is a complete translation and whether it is available online anywhere. I just had a brief look at it and noticed that it had a translation in one column and the original language (transliterated) in another.

Searching the SOAS online library catalogue though, the one I can find was printed in 1920. I'm not sure if this is same one I saw in the library. I'll have to check again next time I go in to the SOAS University Library:
The Babylonian story of the deluge and the epic of Gilgamish : with an account of the royal libraries of Nineveh by Budge, E. A. Wallis, (Ernest Alfred Wallis), Sir, 1857-1934. London : British Museum, 1920
Just looking at the British Library Online Catalogue, in a search of books that were printed before 1922 and have Gilgamesh in the title, there are only three results. One appears to be German: "Das Gilgamesch-Epos". Another is in Russian and one is in English:

An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic on the basis of recently discovered texts by JASTROW, Morris, and CLAY (Albert Tobias). JASTROW, Morris, and CLAY (Albert Tobias). Shelfmark: Ac.2692.ma/5
The British Library catalogue search isn't very good, because if you then search for Gilgamish with an i instead of an e, you get 2 completely different results. These appear to be the same as the ones I saw in the SOAS Library:
The Babylonian Story of the Deluge and the Epic of Gilgamish, with an account of the royal libraries of Nineveh. [Signed: E. A. Wallis Budge.] With eighteen illustrations. pp. 58. London, 1920. Shelfmark: 7701.e.16

The Epic of Gilgamish [Introduction, text and translation]. By Stephen Langdon. [With plates.] University Museum: Philadelphia, 1917. Shelfmark: Ac.2692.q/5.
So there ARE PD translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh. We just need to find an online copy. If there are no online copies, it will have to be scanned.
Excuse the archaeology - I was suddenly interested in the various attempts to capture Gilgamesh for LV. Would someone consider recording the portion of the pamphlet Nicholas mentions last-but-one:

The Babylonian Story of the Deluge and the Epic of Gilgamish - https://archive.org/stream/babylonianstoryo00brituoft#page/n43/mode/2up (pages 40-57 on archive.org version)
or better:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7096/pg7096.html (The Gutenberg version is the same text, minus the footnotes, scholarly interpolations and cuneiform illustrations - about 5,500 words.)

Obviously this is not the ideal way to record the work; but given copyright restrictions elsewhere, I think this translation of the tablets with its brief introduction and comments on the lacunӕ would still be worth having. It would not be necessary to grapple with the earlier part of the text, concerning the discrete matter of the Flood material.

The translator/author of the pamphlet, the celebrated E. A. Wallis Budge (1857-1934), is of course worldwide PD.

Martin
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Post by Leni »

I am not an authority on the Gilgamesh - not even knowledgeable about it, really - but having recently read about it within the context of Ancient Epic, I would say no definite translation of it will ever be done anyway, unless some phenomenal archeologic discovery comes into play. :D There are plenty of lacunae and, more, our knowledge of cuneiform seems to be still very much in progress. That being said, I think it is worth having the recording for LV, as a stand-alone or, considering it is 5500 words, as part of a collection. Personally, I think that most renditions/translations of old texts are worth having, if not for the text itself, for the snapshot of the scholarly thought on the matter. The same applies to the Satyricon, for example, or other fragmentary texts.

Just my two cents, of course.
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marys44
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Post by marys44 »

http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/eog/

maybe this could be used, given the intro

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Post by TriciaG »

It looks like they're just covering their rears - they know it's under copyright, but are posting it with the caveat that they'll remove it if the copyright holder complains.

They're incorrect about the length of US copyright. It's not Life+70 in cases like this, but Life+95. It will be US-PD in 2037.
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Post by TriciaG »

I just noticed on the title page, they have this:

This work is not in the public domain. It has a nominal copyright in the United States due to its date and location of publication. We have attempted without success to contact the current copyright holder. If you are the current copyright holder and wish to have this removed from this site, please contact us. Commercial use of these files is strictly prohibited.
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Post by pfil2u »

To summarize, there are almost no public domain translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh -- but there are a few, so a LV recording is possible (see posts above for references to specific versions). I have read and been moved by many different translations of this work; it is great in really every sense of the word. Let me argue why recording this should not be a priority for LV.

The old translations are much worse than the new ones -- objectively. This is not a matter of outdated style. The epic is fragmentary (even today); the painstaking work of putting together its pieces has been going on since the mid-1800s. So as we go farther and farther back in time, smaller and smaller fractions of what we have now were available then. Not only that, but the language Gilgamesh was written in had to be deciphered after having been dead for about 2,000 years. And scholars have gotten better at this over time.

So much of what we love about this work just isn't there in the oldest translations. Their text was much more fragmentary; when they had to guess, they had much less context to work from; often they didn't understand the language as well as later translators.

So while these early translations were extremely important historically, we must be aware that on both scholarly and artistic counts they are shadows of the newer ones. Again, not to say they can't be recorded for LV, but let us not have any illusions: we only have inadequate translations to choose from today, and we may not see a really good option (I'm thinking of E. A. Speiser's of I think 1950) fall into PD in our lifetimes.
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Post by Hokuspokus »

You are of course right with every thing you say, pfil2u.

But I don't come to the same conclusion. It would be great to have one of the older translations especially because there will be no better one pd in the next future. If there was one really good and nearly complete in 2 or 3 years I'd agree to wait for that.

And anyway, LV has no priorities. It's the reader's choice what they record.

I recorded a German translation of Ishtar going to the underworld some time ago. It had lots of missing words but it was enough left to follow the story. It was very interesting to record (and I hope, interesting to listen to).
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