When a storm shakes the windows and steals your clothes bare

I had not thought for years about the fact that the detritus of my office includes the file of an unrevised and unpublished translation intended for a bilingual edition of Ištar's Descent to the Underworld.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.