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‘Gilgamesh’ Review: Love and Death in Mesopotamia

The epic of Gilgamesh is more than 40 centuries old. Simon Armitage’s new translation feels thrillingly alive.

By William Giraldi, WSJApril 24, 2026

Much as I admire Simon Armitage's translation, I must say that I am overwhelmed by the excellence of the reviewer, William Giraldi . He is much plauded for his fiction, literary criticism, and journalism. Reading though this review, I often find myself celebrating his uncanny ability to find the mot juste at the very moment when I was wondering how he would extricate himself from a difficult, intricate sentence / thought.

There is something almost absurd about attempting to appraise “Gilgamesh,” as though one were asked to appraise wind, or love, or that first human thought that trembled toward language.…