« previous post | next post » ‘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.…