He's not allowed on the shelves in my office. The shelves in the dining room are semi-fair game because Hestia slept on them as a tiny kitten and it's difficult to dissuade her rationally now that she's a larger cat, so Autolycus feels left out if he doesn't get the same rights. If they wrecked any of the books, they'd lose napping privileges p.d.q. no matter what, but the worst that's happened so far is an enthusiastic leap once unseated Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World (1997). And I can live with that, provided it only happens every six months.
I did not know about that...
So there was the semester in 2005 where I was posting each new section of Ištar's Descent as I translated it, because I was reading it for a class with Eckart Frahm. (That was great.) At the time, my publisher was displaying some interest in collecting and publishing the translation; Eckart encouraged me in this idea and even suggested that I add some supplementary material for people who weren't all that familiar with Mesopotamian myth. (And in the course of discussing the kind of material I wanted to include, I managed to step on the boundaries of a fellow student in a way that I feel sure they have never forgiven me for, even when in all likelihood they have either forgotten or just don't think about it anymore. It still upsets me.) Then my publisher lost interest in the idea and no one else ever displayed any and it's nearly ten years later and I don't feel confident enough in my knowledge of the language anymore to believe it would be worth going back to the project; I haven't lost all my Akkadian, obviously, because I found myself writing way too much about the conjugation of Akkadian verbs to yhlee the other night, but it's no longer in my brain every day. And I am not sure I am a good enough scholar for the translation to be taken seriously if I ever did publish it. I have no academic life or record anymore. It would look like a dilettante project. It wasn't, and I don't want it to be.
. . . okay, there's a lot of Tiny Wittgenstein tied up in that folder, isn't there?
no subject
He's not allowed on the shelves in my office. The shelves in the dining room are semi-fair game because Hestia slept on them as a tiny kitten and it's difficult to dissuade her rationally now that she's a larger cat, so Autolycus feels left out if he doesn't get the same rights. If they wrecked any of the books, they'd lose napping privileges p.d.q. no matter what, but the worst that's happened so far is an enthusiastic leap once unseated Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World (1997). And I can live with that, provided it only happens every six months.
I did not know about that...
So there was the semester in 2005 where I was posting each new section of Ištar's Descent as I translated it, because I was reading it for a class with Eckart Frahm. (That was great.) At the time, my publisher was displaying some interest in collecting and publishing the translation; Eckart encouraged me in this idea and even suggested that I add some supplementary material for people who weren't all that familiar with Mesopotamian myth. (And in the course of discussing the kind of material I wanted to include, I managed to step on the boundaries of a fellow student in a way that I feel sure they have never forgiven me for, even when in all likelihood they have either forgotten or just don't think about it anymore. It still upsets me.) Then my publisher lost interest in the idea and no one else ever displayed any and it's nearly ten years later and I don't feel confident enough in my knowledge of the language anymore to believe it would be worth going back to the project; I haven't lost all my Akkadian, obviously, because I found myself writing way too much about the conjugation of Akkadian verbs to
. . . okay, there's a lot of Tiny Wittgenstein tied up in that folder, isn't there?