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5 Gilgamesh in the Twenty-First Century (2000–2009) Gilgamesh, who was born and flourished in the mid-third millennium B.C.E., is alive and well almost five thousand years later at the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era. The continuing vitality of the epic is suggested by its worldwide popularity reaching from England and France to Australia in books for children, such as Damian Morgan’s Gil’s Quest, Geraldine McCaughrean’s Gilgamesh the Hero, Nicole Leurpendeur ’s Das Gilgamesch-Epos, and Jacques Cassabois’s Le premier roi du monde—L’épopée de Gilgamesh, a toned-down adaptation based on his earlier novel.1 The same years in Germany could boast of a musical for performance by children: Gilgamesch macht Ärger (“Gilgamesh makes trouble”) with words by Hans Zimmer and score by Wolfhard Bartel.2 And in the Netherlands the well-known actor Frank Groothof published an illustrated Gilgamesj with song texts and music by Marjet Huibert.3 Artists and musicians continued to find inspiration in the epic. Conspicuously , German artists of the new millennium still outpace all others in their fascination with Gilgamesh and in the variety and extent of their Gilgamesh in the Twenty-First Century (2000–2009) 155 treatments. Germany saw exhibitions of drawings and paintings by Reinhard Minkewitz, who depicts various figures from the epic in isolated situations, such as “Ishtar Beats the Drum” (Leipzig, 2006); a series of transparencies by Martin Blessman that, inspired by the fall of the Berlin wall, use the epic to portray the transitory nature of power as well as the search for immortality as a metaphor for the contemporary desire for ever longer lives (Bonn, 2006); and a cycle by Anna Ghadaban, who took isolated images from the story as the basis for abstract gouaches (Kusterdingen, Baden-Württemberg, 2009). In 2005 the Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur in Mainz sponsored an exhibit featuring “Das GilgameschEpos ” as seen by three generations of artists (specifically Hegenbarth, Baumeister, and Minkewitz). One of the most remarkable enterprises was undertaken in 2005 by Burkhard Pfister (b. 1949), who created a graphic novel (with text by Ursula Broicher) consisting of some 400 drawings organized into twelve individually published “tablets” of about thirty pages each.4 In 2010–11 the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart presented a special exhibition of Willi Baumeister’s “Gilgamesch-Zyklus.” In 2007 the composer Wolfgang Witzenmann premiered his oratorio Gilgamesch und Christus, which compares and contrasts the lives of the two figures—a theme going back to Jensen and other scholars and to the Babel and Bible debate at the turn of the previous century. In May 2009, the fiftieth anniversary of Bohuslav Martinů’s death was acknowledged in Dresden with a scholarly symposium plus a much-acclaimed performance of the composer’s Gilgamesh oratorio at the Sing-Akademie. The first decade of the new century also produced its share of translations . In the United States, Benjamin Foster, a Yale professor of Near Eastern languages, translated into free verse the first eleven tablets of the Akkadian epic, The Epic of Gilgamesh, accompanied by renditions of the Sumerian poems (by Douglas Frayne) and the Hittite version (by Gary Beckman). In keeping with the format of the Norton Critical Editions, the useful volume includes a brief but informative introduction plus three critical essays and a poem by Hillary Major.5 The American poet Stephen Mitchell, who has published highly regarded translations from several languages (most notably of Rilke), brought out in 2004 his lively “version” of Tablets I–XI, Gilgamesh: A New English Translation, undertaken because he “had never been convinced by the language of any translation of it” that he had read.6 Since he admittedly had no knowledge of Akkadian, he 156 Chapter 5 based his own rendition on several earlier versions in English, French, and German and notably on Andrew George’s edition, keeping as near as possible to the literal meaning but omitting the formulaic repetitions, filling in the gaps, and elaborating when transitions seemed necessary (65–66). The adaptation uses a loose pentameter line that often, stressing four strong beats, catches the rhythms of the original: Surpassing all kings, powerful and tall beyond all others, violent, splendid, a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader. (71) And while his version stays generally close to the line and pace of the original, Mitchell adds vivid touches to enliven the scenes: He drew close. Shamhat touched him on the thigh, touched his penis, and put him inside...

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