When a storm shakes the windows and steals your clothes bare

[sovay]

I had not thought for years about the fact that the detritus of my office includes the file of an unrevised and unpublished translation intended for a bilingual edition of Ištar's Descent to the Underworld. The project had grown out of my habit of posting each installment of the epic to LJ as we finished reading it in class, accidentally serving as proof of concept for an audience; I had a publisher at the time who was interested and more importantly a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations who would have mentored me through the process. It would not have been an academic book, facing cuneiform notwithstanding. It would have needed an introduction and notes for non-readers of Akkadian which I would have needed to learn how to write. It never happened. I became acutely and then chronically ill, the publisher lost interest, I lost access to the professor, and judging from the archaeological strata of notes and articles layered in the folder, nothing was added to it later than 2005, eighteen years and a life ago. It is not, therefore, exactly like the free translation of the Agamemnon once rendered by Andrew Crocker-Harris in rhyming couplets, lost for good, except in the sense that it is never going to be a book rather than a loose-leafed work-print translation augmented by an aborted bibliography and ornamented with other artifacts of my non-starter career as an Assyriologist like the text of the second tablet of the Old Babylonian version of Gilgameš and a drift-in of memorabilia including the set list for a Decemberists concert which I attended around the same time I was grading a midterm for my students in Latin 110. Not even the ghost of a book, the ghost of its absence. We are in the month of Tammuz, Araḫ Dumuzu. Let the dead come up and smell the incense.

Comments

[phi]

:hugs:

[asakiyume]

That would have been wonderful to have in the world. How much of it did you finish?

[batdina]

:::hugs::: and much empathy.

[thistleingrey]

Much fellow-feeling (unsure whether "empathy" is right, but this resonates). Just--doors close yet also open.

[kore]

//support and hugs

[dhampyresa]

*hugs*

If it helps, I would be delighted to read whatever you have of it ♥

[sovay]

:hugs:

*hugs*

[sovay]

That would have been wonderful to have in the world. How much of it did you finish?

I have a complete translation; it just isn't what I would have called even then a professionally publishable rendering rather than the literal one I was sharing with my friendlist on LJ. None of the supplementary material was ever written. At the time, there were not a lot of easily available translations of Ištar's Descent—I knew of two others in English, Ben Foster's and Stephanie Dalley's, and both were part of larger collections of Mesopotamian myths and literature as opposed to specifically focused on the context and transmission and variants of this one version. Now, of course, you can just get the text online.

[sovay]

:::hugs::: and much empathy.

Thank you.

*hugs*

[sovay]

Much fellow-feeling (unsure whether "empathy" is right, but this resonates). Just--doors close yet also open.

Thank you.

[sovay]

//support and hugs

*hugs*

[sovay]

If it helps, I would be delighted to read whatever you have of it

Thank you. The stuff I posted to LJ is still in my archives! It has all the words in the right place, but I wanted something more than literal meaning if it was going to be a way into the myth and the world.

*hugs*

[gwynnega]

::hugs::

I can't help but think this project could be of even more interest now (what with the recent publication of things like Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf translation, etc.), or might be in the future.

[selkie]

You never know. You’re still pretty good at what you do, and sometimes there are little magpie-acquired grants for such things.
*hugs*

[sovay]

You never know. You’re still pretty good at what you do, and sometimes there are little magpie-acquired grants for such things.

*hugs*

[sovay]

I can't help but think this project could be of even more interest now (what with the recent publication of things like Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf translation, etc.), or might be in the future.

*hugs*

[radiantfracture]

I would read it, as-is, imperfect offering and all.

Hugs.

[sovay]

I would read it, as-is, imperfect offering and all.

Thank you.

*hugs*

[sholio]

I'm sorry. It can be so strange and painful finding those relics of ways life didn't go.

[sovay]

I'm sorry. It can be so strange and painful finding those relics of ways life didn't go.

Thank you.

[asakiyume]

I'm still comforted by the fact that you still have yours, handwritten as it is.

[rushthatspeaks]

Love you so much.

[sovay]

Love you so much.

I love you.