#current reading

I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.

“He wished that he could break out his knitting, but for some reason, people didn’t take you seriously as a warrior when you were knitting. He’d never figured out why. Making socks required four or five double-ended bone needles, and while they weren’t very large, you could probably jam one into someone’s eye if you really wanted to. Not that he would. He’d have to pull the needle out of the sock to do it, and then he’d be left with the grimly fiddly work of rethreading the stitches. Also, washing blood out of wool was possible, but a pain. Still, if he had to suddenly pull out his sword and fend off an attack, there was a chance he’d drop the yarn, and since he’d been feeling masochistic and was using two colors for this current set of socks, there was absolutely no chance the yarn wouldn’t get tangled and then he’d be trying to murder people while chasing the yarn around. And god forbid the tide rose and he went berserk. You never got the knitting untangled after that; you usually just had to throw it away completely.”

Just finished Gilgamesh: A New Verse Translation by Simon Armitage (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2026). Armitage is a fine poet, but, as he himself admits, he knows no Akkadian* -- he worked from a literal line-by-line translation by the Assyriologist Jacob Dahl. I have no problem with this as long as the end product is worthwhile English verse, and in this case it certainly is. Armitage's (mostly) four-beat lines flow easily and eloquently., keeping the reader engrossed; he uses a modern vernacular that (unlike some more awkward versions) never screams "This is POETRY!" The one oddity of his version is that when drawing upon Old Babylonian tablets that predate the "classical" recension by Sin-leqi-unnini, he switches to prose. I'm honestly not sure why this is necessary (is Old Babylonian any less "poetic"?), but one does get used to it after a while.

update: