This brilliant new treatment of the oldest epic in the world is a literary event. Esteemed translator and best-selling author Stephen Mitchell breathes life into a 3,700-year-old classic, delivering a lithe and muscular rendering that shows how startlingly alive Gilgamesh is, how filled with intelligence and beauty. It is the story of literature's first hero, and his journey of self-discovery. Along the way, Gilgamesh discovers that friendship can bring peace to a whole city, that a preemptive attack on a monster may have dire consequences, and that wisdom can be found only when the quest for it is abandoned. There have been competent scholarly translations of Gilgamesh--now there is a version that is a superlative literary text in its own right. In his introduction, Mitchell reveals the universal truths that Gilgamesh has for today's polarized world, and shows that it is more potent and fascinating than ever.