Jan 28
Simon Armitage, from a poem titled "I Say I Say I Say," featured in The Shout: Selected Poems
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Simon Armitage, from a poem titled "I Say I Say I Say," featured in The Shout: Selected Poems
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The Last Days of Troy, by Simon Armitage (2014).
Just finished Gilgamesh: A New Verse Translation by Simon Armitage (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2026). Armitage is a fine poet, but, as he himself admits, he knows no Akkadian* -- he worked from a literal line-by-line translation by the Assyriologist Jacob Dahl. I have no problem with this as long as the end product is worthwhile English verse, and in this case it certainly is. Armitage's (mostly) four-beat lines flow easily and eloquently., keeping the reader engrossed; he uses a modern vernacular that (unlike some more awkward versions) never screams "This is POETRY!" The one oddity of his version is that when drawing upon Old Babylonian tablets that predate the "classical" recension by Sin-leqi-unnini, he switches to prose. I'm honestly not sure why this is necessary (is Old Babylonian any less "poetic"?), but one does get used to it after a while.
All in all, this version has an honorable place among the many, many Gilgameshes out there. It's not a scholarly edition and makes no pretense to be so -- if you're looking for a translation that acknowledges all the gaps and ambiguous readings in the original, I recommend Andrew George's magisterial Penguin Classics version -- but on the readability scale, it ranks very high.
*Armitage's introduction is a fun read and a bit combative: he tackles head-on the contention of Assyriologists like the aforementioned Andrew George and Benjamin R. Foster that a "true" translation requires a mastery of the original language. He counters with the claim that poetic skill is just as important as philological competence, and I largely agree, but one still longs for the day when one person will combine both disciplines, a la Emily Wilson with the Iliad and Odyssey.
For medieval project last year
I think this is coming out in April. It already looks fabulous.
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[Bordered Sallow]
Before the raised eyebrows and the big tut-tut,
did any of you lot ever truly try burning a book?
You have to attend, broddle and stoke, make flames go leafing
page to page, drive oxygen into the gills till a sheaf
peels open exposing its sheets to the blaze,
get the parchments – wadded and slabbed – to surrender in turn
until the effacements begin, before the retractions of ink. Even then some charred erratum or index
floats off through the trees, some ashen verse or black-edged stanza
can still be riddled from layers of sludge after rain.
How many books did I burn? Scores.
Whose books? Whose books did I burn? Reader, I burned yours.
The two then talk of love: its grief; also its grace.
—Simon Armitage (trans.), Gawain and the Green Knight
just finished simon armitage's theater adaptation of the odyssey and came to the conclusion that we need to talk more about it.
![[Bordered Sallow]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/f5d6be48adfff2b256aed4ce77b1a79f/d9bd26dee79cbb74-a2/s400x600/7bb571e7322d8b9b370cfa9cf310605074f15d53.jpg)