october
p h i l i p t e r ry
Dictator
Carcanet Classics 9781784106188 Paperback £12.99
216 x 135mm 144pp 25th Octomber 2018 DCF, CFP World rights E-book also available
Dictator recreates Gilgamesh using the 1500 word vocabulary of Globish (from the words “global” and “English”) put together by Jean-Paul Nerrière. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to record business transactions. Nerrière considered Globish the world dialect of the third millennium; so too Akkadian, the language of Gilgamesh, was the lingua franca of communications in the Near East. This link between script, language and business is there in the substance of the poem. An underpinning theme involves trade, here the trade in hard wood and access to forests for building materials links the poem to recent wars in and around Iraq, where the contemporary commodity is oil. This in turn links the poem to related issues such as migration and the refugee crisis. Working with refugees in Palermo, Terry was involved with putting on a puppet version of Gilgamesh: the children related to the boat scene viscerally.
Philip Terry is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Essex. His books include Ovid Metamorphosed, poetry collections Dante’s Inferno, Quennets, and Bad Times, and the novel tapestry, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He translated Raymond Queneau’s Elementary Morality and Georges Perec’s I Remember.
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