Simon Armitage's Gilgamesh: Poet Laureate Retells a 4,000-Year-Old Epic

Poet laureate Simon Armitage has published a new translation of Gilgamesh, the epic that originated in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) at least 4,000 years ago. The Guardian's reviewer calls it "a tour de force" — and, unusually for a laureate, it's partly a poem about royalty behaving badly.

That's the irony at the heart of the story. The laureate's post pays £5,750 per annum plus a barrel of sherry, and it carries no specific duties — only an expectation of verse for public occasions and royal events. Armitage has met that expectation with Floral Tribute, written on the death of Elizabeth II, and a poem marking the coronation of Charles and Camilla in 2023.

Why a laureate writing about royal misdeeds is unusual

No laureate is going to write about the royals themselves misbehaving. It wasn't John Dryden, the first laureate, who wrote about Charles II's bedroom habits — that was John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Yet with Gilgamesh, as the reviewer notes, Armitage "does deliver a poem about royalty's misdeeds, at least in part."

The epic's protagonist supplies the material. Gilgamesh, a demigod and king of Uruk, lords it over his subjects. Among his bad habits, he exercises the "right of the first night", which allows him to bed newlywed brides before their husbands.

What happens in the epic?

The gods create a counterpart to check Gilgamesh's powers: the wild man Enkidu, who confronts the king outside the house of one of these brides. The two rivals become comrades and embark on a series of extraordinary adventures:

• Battles with Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest
• A fight with the winged Bull of Heaven, sent by the goddess Ishtar in revenge after Gilgamesh rejects her marriage proposal
• Enkidu's death, which sends Gilgamesh on a solitary, desperate quest for immortality that leads him to the very edge of the world

What does this change for readers?

For English-language readers, it means one of the oldest surviving works of literature — a text that predates Homer by a millennium and more — is now available in the voice of Britain's most prominent working poet. The Guardian's verdict, "brilliantly translated for our times", suggests this isn't a scholarly exercise but a living poem, one whose themes of power abused, friendship, grief and mortality map directly onto contemporary concerns.

The choice also says something about the laureateship itself. Armitage has balanced the ceremonial obligations with ambitious independent work, and Gilgamesh shows the office can be a platform for large-scale reclamation projects, not just occasional verse.

Whether the translation draws new readers to cuneiform-era literature, as the reviewer's enthusiasm implies it deserves to, will be the measure of its success.