Sunday, April 15, 2007

Work in progress announcement


To all those holding their breath for additional pastoral elegies from the antique world:

I am currently working on the translation of a Hittite pastoral elegy about a shepherd (what else!) and archer against his will named Hattutaswili. The problem is that the cuneiform tablets it's on are in very poor shape, so that a lot of text is missing or blurred.

Their condition is nowhere near as good as the one shown above.

For consolation, I'm posting a quote from the Hittite Lullaby John Ashbery discovered:
More letters from the Sphinx
About what it was like [...]
All aspirations in the teeth
Of some pedantic ritual.
(from John Ashbery, As We Know, 1979)

No comments: