In its texture, though, this tablet, like a coda in a musical composition, includes motifs that have woven themselves through the first 11 tablets. It is a direct translation of a Sumerian original, and it contains brief speeches that are not only expressive but magical as well. The story ends with Enkidu giving a doleful account of life among the dead. Gardner believed strongly in the traditional view that true art should seek to improve life, not debase it. Art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists and cynics, is not proper art at all.
Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.
For John Gardner, it became his supreme fiction. John R. Maier, an English professor at SUNY Brockport, has studied ancient Sumerian and Akkadian literature and, in 1979-1980, was a Fulbright Lecturer at the universities of Aleppo and Jordan. He has also worked on contemporary Arabic fiction.