Dictator [Paperback]

DictatorrecreatesGilgameshusing the 1,500-word vocabulary of Globish, 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 it the world dialect of the third millenium; likewise Akkadian, the language ofGilgamesh, was thelingua francaof communications in the Near East. This link between script, language and business is there in the substance of the poem. An underpinning theme involving trade, here 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 in 2017, Terry was involved with putting on a puppet version ofGilgameshwhere the children related viscerally to the story, particularly the boat scenes.

Philip Terrywas born in Belfast and has taught at the universities of Caen, Plymouth and Essex, where he is currently Director of the Centre for Creative Writing. His books include the anthology of short stories,Ovid Metamorphosed(2000), the poetry collectionsOulipoems(2006), Oulipoems 2(2009) andShakespeare’s Sonnets(2011), and the noveltapestry(2013), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He is the translator of Raymond Queneau’sElementary Morality(2007), and Georges Perec’sI Remember(2014).Dante’s Inferno, which relocates Dante’s poem to current-day Essex, was published in 2014 and was an Independent poetry title of the year.