If my path fills with darkness and there's no sign of light

[sovay]

My poem "On the Day When Dumuzi Comes Up" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. It was written last August when I was living for a month at the Baystate on Mass Ave; I had a bad weekend, read some Akkadian I hadn't looked at in eleven years, wrote a poem drawing on Ištar's Descent to the Underworld (as well as a sex charm and a hangover cure) while thinking about the friend who taught me the language. Learned later that same day that they had just had a stroke. Am very happy to report these days that they aten't dead (and I owe them e-mail), but the timing was unsettling. I was writing about the Anunnaki, not asking them to drop by. In any case, the poem has a home.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! I didn't know you read Akkadian. Does one do that in cuneiform, or is it generally transliterated?

[sovay]

Congratulations! I didn't know you read Akkadian. Does one do that in cuneiform, or is it generally transliterated?

Thank you!

Most of the texts that I worked with were transliterations, but we were taught to read the Neo-Assyrian forms of the signs. (I had some very small familiarity with older Babylonian forms, but not so as I could do anything with them at this point except distinguish them by sight.) I don't know how many signs I had memorized at my best. After more than ten years of disuse, I have what feels like a very small1111111111* handful of leftover recognition of signs, employed almost strictly when in the Near Eastern wings of museums or really randomly online; I'm not sure I can generate any except the simplest from memory. I retain much more of the grammar and morphology and a random assortment of vocabulary that my brain tends to hand me when I'm trying to come up with Hebrew. The rest of this paragraph had a terminal case of Tiny Wittgenstein and had to be shown the door.

* Autolycus thought that adjective needed emphasis.