This new translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, accompanied by a wide-ranging introduction, numerous notes, and a group of essays at the end, with expertise and passion invites the non-specialist reader to engage with this relic of Mesopotamian culture as an appealing work of world literature. Following the traditional pattern of sewing together manuscripts from different times and places to achieve a running story, and being honest about, but visually minimizing, its fragmentary state, Helle offers a rendering that reads very well and is an impressive tribute to both his philological scholarship and his ear for effective English. No student of the Epic will agree with his understanding of every passage, by any means, but no one who has actually translated it from the original could fail to appreciate the reflection that went into this project. To choose an example of the old problems Helle alludes to, it seems to this reader most unlikely that the mudbrick walls of Uruk were “white as wool” (p. 3), rather than straight and as pleasing to the eye as a taut mason's line stretched between the viewer and the settlement – and so on, throughout the poem. To this reader, the introduction focussed too much on the modern scholarly experience of working with the text, its modern reception, and justification for this approach to translation, but included less than is needed about the text itself for ”confused” (p. x) readers approaching it for the first time. This reader also found it a challenge to locate Helle's comments on specific topics in his work, and would have appreciated at least a summary index of subjects, as one can be sure that he touches on what he is looking for somewhere in his enjoyable but not always concise expositions. Every translator has an array of decisions to make. To this reader, the vigorous, modernist poetic register of this treatment seemed far enough from the often understated, deceptively bland tone of Standard Babylonian poetry as to border here and there on a re-telling, but the finished product hangs together well and is quite effective, so one can appreciate that the translator felt it necessary to offer the modern reader more forceful diction and rose to meet his own challenge. Helle is keen on puns and alliteration in the original, but less so on the sometimes stilted syntax that marked Babylonian poetic style, which he chooses not to reflect in his translation in favour of readability. He prefers to glide over its archaisms. These are all choices that he is prepared to defend. Readers would likely miss some clever verbal turns, like choosing “weevil” (p. 56) because the translator wants a small obnoxious creature and the English word seems to portmanteau a Scottish one to that effect, but the translator explains his decision. His reluctance to consider Shamhat a harlot (p. 210), to choose another current topic of discussion, runs up against Enkidu's curse and ironic blessing of her (pp. 64, 66), while only the most desperate over-reading can result in anything but understanding her as a “sex worker”, or something more elegant, like courtesan or cocotte if one prefers; there is nothing in those two passages about a sacerdotal role, but a lot about abasement and ardent and generous clients. One can, if one wishes, dismiss all the old literature on Mesopotamian prostitution as overheated male imagination, but these two passages speak for themselves and cannot easily be explained away except by ignoring what they actually say. It would indeed be hard to imagine a non-professional or non-promiscuous social role for a woman who is prepared to have intercourse on demand at a waterhole with a naked, hairy wild man she has never seen before. That she becomes attached to him is just another of the numerous piquant twists in this poem, but the two part seemingly without regret. We just wish we knew what Enkidu gives her when they get to Uruk, but, as Helle notes, new passages come to light all the time, even as we polish and rethink our translations. Or, to choose an old topic, the sources of the Epic, this reader holds obstinately to his thesis (Journal of the American Oriental Society 125, 2005, 59 ff.) that there is an Akkadian as well as a Sumerian background; from this are drawn episodes not present in any Sumerian version, such as passing through darkness and coming out into light (said of Sargon of Akkad), running through the wilderness, losing his clothes, and meeting a sabitu, possibly a gazelle in the original but a barkeep in the adapted version (a brilliant transfer that works only in Akkadian, and as ingenious as making the tomb of Gilgamesh in Sumerian the tomb of Enkidu in Akkadian), but the reviewer bows before the truth of the old saying “nec Hercules contra traditionem”. Helle is well read in modern treatments of the Epic, its themes, and cultural background, as amply evidenced in his notes (so content-rich that he cannot resist an occasional Assyriological digression); hence if he considered and rejected this idea, so be it – perhaps future generations will follow the hero's example by coming out of darkness into light. Helle can be readily forgiven, among so much reading, for overlooking the reviewer's reworking of his 1991 essay on authorship in I. Berensmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Authorship (Cambridge, 2019), 13–26. The poet Robert Frost reminds us that “End is a gloomy word”. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a story that ended long ago but has been brought back to life by valiant and creative efforts such as this one.