The first ever collection in English of Ice Age Poetry, drawn from the cave drawings and inscriptions at Lascaux, unpacking their meaning and resonance in the 21st Century.
This newest Carcanet Classic collects the oldest poetry yet discovered, as written down or runed in the Ice Age in Lascaux and other caves in the Dordogne, and now translated—tentatively—into English for the first time. The translation is at two removes, from French versions by the mysterious linguistic genius Jean-Luc Champerret, and then from the striking originals that retain such a sense of early human presence. Philip Terry mediates between the French and those hitherto inscrutable originals. Jean-Luc Champerret’s unique contribution to world literature is in his interpretation of the cave signs. And Philip Terry’s contribution is to have discovered and rendered this seminal, hitherto unsuspected work into English. The translated poems are experiments, as the drawings may have
been to the original cave poets composing them as image and sound. While archaeologists maintain that these signs are uninterpretable, Champerret assigns them meanings byanalogy, then—in an inspired act of creative reading—inserts them into the frequent 3 x 3 grids to be found at Lascaux. The results—revelation of Ice-Age poetry—are startling. Terry provides context, sign-grids, and translations. He is adept at bringing up close poetry from languages and scripts remote in time.
Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet and translator. His interests include the theory and practice of creative writing, particularly the work of Oulipo, experimental translation, and hybrid forms of writing and poetry. He has taught at the universities of Caen, Plymouth and Essex, where he established the Centre for Creative Writing. His books include Ovid Metamorphosed (2000) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2011), and the novel Tapestry (2013), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Dante’s Inferno, which relocates Dante’s poem to current-day Essex, was published in 2014. His poetry collection Quennets was published in 2016, and his re-imagining of Gilgamesh, Dictator, was published in 2018.
* First ever collection in English of Ice Age Poetry, drawn from the cave drawings and inscriptions at Lascaux, unpacking their meaning and resonance in the 21st Century * A new order of inventive, experimental and radical translation * The translation is at two removes, from the Ice Age language and from French versions by the mysterious Jean-Luc Champerret * Jean-Luc Champerret is an invented figure whose unique contribution to world literature was to be the first to interpret the Ice-Age signs found in caves such as Lascaux.
Originally encountered and translated into French by Jean-Luc Champerret in the 1940s, Terry’s reworkings offer the first glimpse into Ice-Age poetic creation ever made available
• A new order of inventive, experimental and radical translation
• Translating Champerret’s four-step process from transcription to contemporary poetry into English, Terry enables an unprecedented perspective on the creative impulses of the Ice-Age inscriptions at Lascaux
• This book represents a new order of inventiveness in Terry’s always radical translation work which includes Ovid, Shakespeare, Queneau, Dante, and Dictator, his ground-breaking version of the ancient Sumerian poem Gilgamesh (2018).
