Clare Hall Book Club

Join the College’s Book Club as they discuss Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse by David Ferry.

"Ferry's Gilgamesh is uniquely his own, self-contained in holding aloof from fads and hype. No display of adjectival fireworks could do justice to his poem's originality or to the integrity of the poet's formal invention. In identifying the poem as Mr. Ferry's, I mean no disrespect to Sin-leqe-unninni, the ancient poet-editor that Babylonian tradition credits as having developed to their highest form the epic adventures of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, and his companion, Enkidu. But like Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat or Ezra Pound's Cathay, Mr. Ferry's Gilgamesh is a miraculous transformation of his original into his own, utterly distinctive idiom . . . Perhaps the poem's most moving element is how the desire for fame is superseded, after the death of Enkidu, by a quest that touches every reader, ancient or modern . . . the wish for physical immortality . . . [Ferry's] technical genius and literary sophistication evoke not only the hero's anguish, but the rage and despair of the untouchable."

Tom Sleigh, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

David Ferry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for his translation of Gilgamesh, is a poet and translator who has also won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, given by the Library of Congress. In 2001, he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ferry is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College.

All College members are welcome to attend in-person, meeting in Clare Hall’s Meeting Room, or via Zoom. If you are not on the mailing list and would like to be, please send an email to gloria.carnevali@icloud.com, confirming your Clare Hall connection and putting the following as the email title: I would like to join the Book Club mailing list.

Learn more about the Book Club on this page.