Gilgamesh
Derrek Hines
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407063638
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 80

Gilgamesh

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Dec 2010
Paperback
15 Jan 2002
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A reworking of the great epic, Gilgamesh. Like Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, this narrative poem brings to life a major work of ancient literature for a modern readership.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first great book of man's heart. Inscribed onto clay tablets around 2400 BC, it enthralled the ancient world with a story of love, heroism, friendship, grief and defiance of the Gods. That it continues to speak to us today, despite its fragmentary state, is testimony to the power and humanity of its themes: King Gilgamesh's lament for his dead friend Enkidu is still among the most powerful poems of mourning in literature.

Inspired by the universality of the Gilgamesh story, the poet Derrek Hines has produced a magnificent reworking of the epic, which brings it into a modern idiom whilst maintaining its timeless quality. His striking imagery breathes a new sensuality and vigour into the characters; his poised and energetic language moves seamlessly between the lyric and the bellicose, the comic and the tragic, the classical and the contemporary.

Like Christopher Logue's War Music, or Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, this is a work that will communicate to today's reader the sheer excitement and wonder that its first audiences must have felt five thousand years ago.
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407063638
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 80
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About the author

Derrek Hines

Derrek Hines was born and raised in Southern Ontario, Canada. He read Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Whilst based on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall he wrote poetry and published a small list of distinguished poets under the Cargo Press imprint. He is the author of Gilgamesh.

Praise for Gilgamesh

[Hines] has taken liberties with the epic poem and emerged with a radical, but alluring new poem of his own... a portrait of masculine belligerence, cloven in two

San Francisco Chronicle

Gilgamesh is Derrek Hines's version of the Gilgamesh Epic - not so much a translation as a vibrant and vigorous reimagining of the world's first book, which should take its place alongside Heaney's Beowulf and Hughes's Ovid on the shelf of revivified classics

Adam Newey, New Statesman

For those whose curiosity is piqued by the recent rash of Gilgamesh translations and adaptations, this version by Canadian-born poet Derrek Hines offers a vivid, modern take

Globe and Mail

His flamboyance and daring make this a delight to read

The Washington Post

Impressive, consistent... packed with good things

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