Showing posts with label John Ashbery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Ashbery. Show all posts

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)