By the late Seventies, Burgess had received a series of TV biblical commissions to write scripts for adaptations of, firstly the Moses story starring Burt Lancaster, and later the New Testament. He was averse to wasting work, so he repurposed his research and writing for these various televisual commissions into novels, and hence his work on Jesus of Nazareth (1977), directed by Franco Zeffirelli and starring Robert Powell as a blue-eyed Christ, was reworked into the novel Man of Nazareth, which is notably different to the screenplay and perhaps closer to Burgess’s own conception of Jesus.
Read moreAnthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 4: The Seventies, Sophocles, and Shocking Sonnets
Burgess’s interest in the Oedipus myth coalesced further in 1972, when he was commissioned to produce a new translation of Oedipus Tyrannos by Sophocles for the Tyrone Guthrie theatre in Minneapolis. In 2017, this translation was reproduced by BBC Radio 3, starring Mancunian actor Christopher Eccleston.
Read moreAnthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 3: The Riddle of Sicily in the Caribbean
The early 1970s were to become somewhat of a golden era for Burgess in terms of language invention. What’s interesting about this phase of glossopoeia in Burgess’s fiction is firstly, that it transcends the novel as genre or form, and secondly, that it migrates out of what we previously termed created dialects of English, such as Nadsat, into creating languages beyond the remit or linguistic framework of English.
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