Dictator by Philip Terry Chatto & Windus O tu che m’ ami

O tu che m’ ami – set thy love in order

a recurrent leitmotif – ‘the woods are wondrous … but strange’

Is this punishment or reward

His are poems nailed into the white pages with the force of bestial silence

translated here from the German and collected for the first time

Dictator by Philip Terry Chatto & Windus O tu che m’ amiDictator recreates Gilgamesh using the 1,500 word vocabulary of Globish, put together by Jean Paul Nerrire. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to record business transactions. Nerrire 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