Check out Stef’s latest Covid-19 lockdown project, a musical reinterpretation of an ancient Sumerian ‘diatribe’ (basically a list of highly entertaining insults, inscribed in cuneiform script on a clay tablet, some time in the second millennium BCE) as an operatic Twitter troll battle! The project was a collaboration with mezzo-soprano Phoebe Haines and Sumerologist Daniel Sánchez Muñoz, written for a Twitter opera project, #SetOperaFree, by Aga Serugo Lugo.

For more information on the text, ‘Engardu the fool’ = Oxford Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) 5.4.11 ‘Diatribe Against Engar-dug‘, see Daniel Sánchez Muñoz’s bibliography here.

Here are some sample phrases from the text:

𒍢𒍝𒈜𒂊𒉈 zi₂-za nar-e-ne – ‘croaker among singers’
Daniel notes that ‘ziza’ is a difficult word to translate. It literally means ‘closed (za) jaw (zi₂ in the most recent transliteration system, ze₂ in the former one)’. Daniel tends to think that it describes someone struggling to move his mouth correctly, which is pretty hard to translate! Dahlia Shehata has provided some comments which further illuminate this phrase. For more information, follow the link to her publication in the bibliography.

𒈬 𒉿𒅋𒈜𒂊𒉈 mu pe-el₂ nar-e-ne – ‘disgraced reputation among singers’