Gilgamesh, o la angustia por la muerte (poema babilonio).

• Author: Pardo, Jose Gonzalo Rubio

This is the second edition of the first Spanish translation of Gilgamesh, made directly from the original Akkadian.(1) Until now, only the Hittite version had received such an honor (A. Bernabe, Textos Literarios Hetitas [Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987], 93-115).

The book is intended for both the layman and the scholar from other fields. Thus, Silva tries to avoid the traditional philological conventions, substituting others that are easier to follow: the restoration of broken words or signs is indicated by italics, full (ad sensum) restorations by brackets, and, where the Old Babylonian version is used to fill a textual gap, it is given in a different font. Also, the traditional division into tablets is replaced by thematic chapters, although keeping the conventional humeration of tablets, columns, and lines.

The subtitle the translator gives the poem, la angustia por la muerte ("Anguish over Death"), along with the introduction and notes, alerts the reader to the Weltanschauung of the epic. In that sense, it is the opposite of such modern works as, for example, Gunter Dux's Liebe und Tod im Gilgamesh-Epos: Geschichte als Weg zum Selbstbewusstsein (Vienna: Passagen, 1992), where Dux seems to rethink Gilgamesh in the light of der Engel der Geschichte of the ninth thesis of W. Benjamin's Uber den Begriff der Geschichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 691-764 - especially pp. 697-98, a reflection (illumination) on Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus.

The introduction initiates the reader into the historical and literary context of the poem. Many footnotes help to explain diverse passages, including fragments of the Hittite version which allegedly complement some of the broken parts of the Akkadian epic. At the end, several philological notes address assorted problems of interpretation.

Tablet twelve is translated in an appendix, following the communis opinio among scholars and ignoring some recent revisionist approaches, such as, for instance, N. Vulpe ("Irony and the Unity of the Gilgamesh Epic," JNES 53 [1994]: 275-83), who defends the unity of the twelve tablets of the epic but ignores the strong linguistic, thematic, and structural arguments against that view (see S. N. Kramer, "The Epic of Gilgames and its Sumerian Sources," JAOS 64 [1944]: 22-23; J. H. Tigay, The Evolution of Gilgamesh Epic [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1982], 5, 26-27, 49; A. Shaffer, "Sumerian Sources of Tablet XII of the Epic of Gilgames" [Ph.D...