Its translation, interpretation, and integration are ongoing. The discovery of a pre-Noah flood story was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, and the poem's allure only continues to grow as additional cuneiform tablets come to light. The poem had to be reassembled, its languages deciphered. Fragments of the poem, incised on clay tablets, were scattered across a huge expanse of desert when it was recovered in the nineteenth century. Schmidt describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis. Acclaimed literary historian Michael Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today. It is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it tells the story of a great king, his heroism, and his eventual defeat. It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Gilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist. Reflections on a lost poem and its rediscovery by contemporary poets Schmidt, Michael Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
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