Some excerpts from the wonderful Gilgamesh - The Life of a Poem, by Michael Schmidt:
Page 32, Tablet 1
He who saw everything, of him learn, o my land, learn
of him who sought to know what lands are for, & people, to turn
to fruitfulness after the wastings and the idlenesses, the ways
to use what is called strength after its misuse, he who had tidings
of times when deltas were of use as deltas and not floodings of excrement...
~ Charles Olson, 'Bigmans II'
Page 46, Tablet 1
"His and Gilgamesh's relationship, whatever its intended nature, is emblematic of the ways in which narrative fact requires the complementarity of invention and its illuminating irony, to find the sense in it. Fiction throws a raking light over fact; it also projects the shadows that make for three-dimensionality in an otherwise flattened chronicle."
