Beauty in world's oldest literature

Ancient Mesopotamia, the region that is now Iraq, gave the world its oldest significant literature. Most prominent in more than 2,500 years of literary production is a corpus of texts in Sumerian, known best from the 18th century BC, and a later corpus in Babylonian, deriving mostly from the 1st millennium BC. The texts are preserved on thousands of fragmentary clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform and, for millennia, buried under the mounds of settlement debris that conceal the remains of the cities of Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria. Nothing of them was known until archaeological excavation began in Mesopotamia 150 years ago. The recovery and conservation of these damaged tablets, the decipherment of their cuneiform script and long-dead languages, the reconstruction from them of many thousands of lines of poetry and prose, all this is one of the most remarkable scholarly achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is also one of the least appreciated.

Fragmentary and obscure texts do not easily make the jump from the scholar's desk to the bedside table. An exception is the masterpiece of Babylonian literature, the epic of Gilgamesh. This long poem about a hero's vain quest for immortality was first presented to a mass market more than a hundred years ago. The period since the Second World War alone has witnessed seven English translations by scholars of Babylonian. Scholarly translations that take as few liberties with the text as possible are sometimes referred to as "literal". But because some literal translations are hard-going, there is a market for easier reads. Stephen Mitchell's Gilgamesh falls into the latter category. Mitchell has made versions of literature in Chinese, Sanskrit, German, Hebrew and Greek; Gilgamesh is his first foray into the ancient Near East.

His intention was to produce a "modern American poem" and he describes how he set about the task. First, he consulted scholarly editions to establish what in his view was a literal prose translation, ignoring gaps in the resulting text or filling them from the imagination. Then "began the real work of raising the language to the level of English verse". The result is a seamless text in rhythmic modern language.

Mitchell knows what presses the right buttons in the mass market, playing to those who wish to be titillated but not offended ("She stripped off her robe and lay there naked,/with her legs apart, touching herself", literally "She let loose her skirts and bared her sex"). I found Mitchell's poem strangely unmoving. Too often, bland paraphrase ousts the more expressive vocabulary of the original ("This is the last time, Urshanabi,/that you are allowed to cross the vast ocean/and reach these shores", literally "May the quay reject you, Urshanabi, and the ferry scorn you!/You who used to walk this shore, suffer absence from it now!"). This version does not compete for pathos, beauty and vividness with freer adaptations by poets such as Herbert Mason, David Ferry and Derrek Hines.

As an exercise in the translation of ancient poetry, The Literature of Ancient Sumer , an anthology of Sumerian literature by the late Jeremy Black and his colleagues, could not offer more of a contrast. Here are 71 texts in the plainest of prose translations, prefaced by a detailed introduction to Sumerian poetry as literature. The selection is garnered from the even larger anthology placed online at the website of Oxford University's Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. Most of the 71 compositions have never appeared in print outside academic journals and scholarly monographs. Some are translated into English for the first time.

The richness of the Sumerian literary corpus is fully evident: narrative poetry of mythological content, heroic adventure (epic), love poetry, praise poetry, hymns and prayers, proverbs, contest poetry and moralising literature. Though the texts are nearly 2,000 years old, the vividness of their language comes across in these literal translations: an army "winds its way through the hills like a snake over a grain-pile"; soldiers crowd around a reunited comrade "exactly as if they were small birds flocking together"; slingstones fall on the besieged "numerous as the raindrops falling in a whole year". This anthology successfully provides a taste of Sumerian literature on a scale never previously attempted. As an academic resource it opens up a previously impenetrable field and will be used in a wide range of university courses. It deserves a wider readership too.

Andrew George is professor of Babylonian, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has translated the epic of Gilgamesh for Penguin Classics and published a critical edition of the text for Oxford University Press.