Dictator

Terry Philip

"Dictator" recreates "Gilgamesh" using the 1500 word vocabulary of Globish (from the words "global" and "English") put together by Jean-Paul Nerriere. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to record business transactions. Nerriere considered Globish the world dialect of the third millennium; so 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.

About the Author

Philip Terry was 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 collections "Oulipoems" (2006), "Oulipoems 2" (2009) and "Shakespeare's Sonnets" (2011), and the novel "Tapestry" (2013), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He is the translator of "Raymond Queneau's Elementary Morality" (2007), and Georges Perec's "I 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.

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