Dictator

by Philip Terry

Dictator recreates Gilgamesh using 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 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 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 of Gilgamesh where the children related viscerally to the story, particularly the boat scenes.

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an interesting read: Gilgamesh done into Globish, a 1500 word version of English designed for international business. Quite impressive.

[John Gossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Dictator” is a translation of Gilgamesh into Globish, a simplified English dialect with a vocabulary of only 1500 words. Globish is designed to be an easy-to-learn language for doing business across the world. Terry reasons that cuneiform was originally a way to write records for business that crossed multiple spoken languages and thus analogous to Globish.

Terry goes further to try to suggest the source material and break us out of our standard interpretation. He applies a strict prose form that divides each line into sections of two syllables, ignoring even word boundaries. Like George, he annotates the work to indicate gaps, interpolations, and breaks in the tablets. Terry goes so far as to indicate entire missing chapters with nothing but pages of ellipses.

Terry does not even concede proper names unless they are in the Globish vocabulary. Thus “Gilgamesh” is translated as “Dictator,” or more accurately to fit the prose form “DICTA | TOR”. Enkidu becomes “WILDMAN”, Uta-napishti becomes “THE ONE | WHO FIND | LIFE”, and the Bull of Heaven and the guardian of the Cedar Forest are translated as “the MAN | COW of | the sky” and “TREE GUARD” respectively. He uses other repeated constructs that suggest literal translation rather than any concession to readability. Thus “WILDMAN said” becomes “WILDMAN | shape he | mouth and | move he | tongue to | to speak | he say”.

Strangely enough, this all works and isn’t even particularly hard to read. For example, here is Enkidu describing his dream that the gods are going to kill him:

Then day | light break | …… [And] WILD | MAN make | of he | mouth a | shape… he say | to DIC | TATOR ‘Listen | to the | dream I | dream in | the night The sky | god | + + + the | war god | the god | of know | ledge and | the sun | god all | meet to | gether | in the | great court | of the | sky… And the | sky god | AN + + + | say to | the war | god… “Because | they kill | the MAN | COW of | the sky | + + + and | because | they kill | TREEGUARD the one* | who cut | down the | hard wood | tree on | the moun | tain side | must die”

It looks odd at first, but I found the book very readable: the simplified grammar, vocabulary, and strict forms compensate for the unfamiliar idioms and notation. Terry also injects a lot of humor, both with his playful idioms and with occasional modern anachronisms, and more deeply with his overall approach of translating into Globish, which is kinda funny in itself. I enjoyed this version immensely, though I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t already read two more straightforward translations.