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- Herausgeber: Banipal Books
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Syrian poet Nouri al-Jarrah brings to life a story that can never again be lost in time after a single line in Aramaic on a tombstone fired his imagination. This inspiring epic poem awakens two extraordinary lovers, Barates, a Syrian from Palmyra, and Regina, the Celtic slave he freed and married, from where they have lain at rest beside Hadrian's Wall for eighteen centuries, and tells their unique story. Barates' elegy to his beloved wife, who died young at 30, is, however, not about mythologising history. With the poet himself an exile in Britain for 40 years from his birthplace of Damascus, the poem forges new connections with today, linking al-Jarrah's personal journey with that of his ancient forebear Barates, who resisted slavery with love. Barates' Eastern song also questions whether the young Celtic fighters, the Tattooed Ones, were really barbarians, as they emerged from forest mists to defend their hills and rivers and their way of life from the Romans, and died or lay wounded at the twisting stone serpent that was Hadrian's Wall.
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The Stone Serpent
Barates of Palmyra’s Elegy for Regina his Beloved
An Eastern Serenade
The Stone Serpent,
Barates of Palmyra’s Elegy for Regina his Beloved
First published in English translation
by Banipal Books, London, October 2022
Arabic copyright © Nouri Al-Jarrah 2022
English translation copyright © Catherine Cobham, 2022
Original Arabic title:
Published by Dar al-Mutawassit, Milan, 2022.
The moral rights of Nouri Al-Jarrah, the author of this work, and Catherine Cobham, the translator of this work, have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A CIP record for this book is available in the British Library
ISBN 978-1-913043-29-2
E-book: ISBN: 978-1-913043-30-8
Front cover image of the tombstone of Regina
© Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums / Bridgeman Images
Banipal Books
1 Gough Square, LONDON EC4A 3DE, UK
www.banipal.co.uk/banipalbooks/
Banipal Books is an imprint of Banipal Publishing
Typeset in Cardo
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
An Eastern Serenade
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
An Eastern Serenade – Barates of Palmyra’s
Elegy for Regina his Beloved
After An Eastern Serenade
Voices and Songs
Regina’s Song by the River
The Archer from Palmyra
The Birth of the Painted Warrior
News of Boudicca
A Roman Elegy
The Tongue of Fire The Ruin
Julia Domna’s Missing Fingers
The Edict of Caracalla
Notes
Related References
Acknowledgements
About the author Nouri Al-Jarrah
About the translator Catherine Cobham
Titles from Banipal Books
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Who is this adventurer who came from the East to liberate a woman from the West and name her Regina, provocatively, as a challenge to the system of slavery that existed in the Roman Empire? Who is Barates1 from Palmyra and who is Regina2 the Celt? A farm worker was turning over the earth in the remains of a Roman fort in the heart of the British Isles, and produced these two names for us. How did a young man tanned by the sun of Palmyra come to put his arm around the waist of a Celtic girl with a red plait, and wander with her over the lush green hills by Hadrian’s Wall, down to the River Tyne, where brown men from Nineveh rowed in small boats carrying cargo from the big ships, chanting in sad voices songs that sounded like strange prayers? It is strange too that these men with their strong muscles and brown faces had left behind their boats in the warm waters of the Euphrates and joined the fleets of Septimius Severus, arriving in this cold water in the North, to become labourers and oarsmen in the shadow of a Roman wall that twists like a stone serpent.
Who is Regina, and who is Barates? Archaeologists found the Celtic woman’s tombstone in the Roman fort of Arbeia. She had died young, in her thirties, and a few miles away they found the grave of Barates. Everything we know about Barates is also everything we know about Regina, contained in one line that the shattered lover had engraved in Aramaic, his native language, on the Palmyrene-style tomb of the beloved woman. So we know that he freed her from slavery, named her Regina (‘Queen’), and she became his lover and his wife, and then he lost her. The hero of this poem did not forget to include his Syrian identity on the tombstone.
A single line fired my imagination, and I, and this poem, are indebted to it.
NJ
An Eastern Serenade
If you weren’t here
if I hadn’t jumped down off this wall that twists
like a stone serpent3
and returned the sword to its owner
could I have stood here in broad daylight
to hear someone calling my name
if you weren’t here
if your voice hadn’t repeated my name in this
bare stretch of land.
The waves carried my boat westwards and I
joined Caesar’s4 army.
Why am I here with these skilful archers5 on
this wall, with the mist roaming over the slopes
and trees, down to the bend in the river,6 and
tumultuous waves breaking over the stone
towers, waves that rose and crashed onto
Caesar’s land here, land of the Caledonian Celts
and barbarians with their shaved heads and faces
painted with flower dyes?
Were they really barbarians?7
When they approached shouting at the tops of
their voices
falling under the arrows
on their sides
and knees
and faces
were they paying the price of love?
O what a land, more remote than any other land,
as if my gods no longer had eyes to see me.
* * *
I ride around on my horse from Cirta, the cold
breeze ruffling his smooth mane, my face
buffeted by the breeze soaked with the blood of
the plunging hordes of the Tattooed Ones8
Those brave fighters from Palmyra string their
bows in the forts and towers, and descend in
waves on chariots laden with shields and spears
and flying banners.
They appear on parade with their thick black
eyebrows and faces burnt by a distant sun.
They travel for miles by day and night in dense
clouds of green under dark drifting skies, ready
to ambush attackers sheltered by the forests,
dispatched by nature to translate its passions
into bloody rounds of fighting.
* * *
How many slaves from Samos, fighters from
Thrace and stonecutters from Tuscany perished
under the stone slabs brought from the quarries
in the winters of York, just so Hadrian had a
wall where he could hide with his Thracian
lover?9
The visiting consul at the door of his tent, two
Macedonian soldiers next to him guarding the
eagle,10 lets his hawk-like eyes roam over the
battle-ready battalions to compare horseman
with horseman and muscle with sword.
* * *
You who stop to read my words that tremble
with cold, did you arrive here like me on a boat
made of cedar wood from the mountains of
Numidia,11 or on a raft thrown down from a
ship near a North Sea shore?
I’m not a standard-bearer, but a cloth merchant
from the East.
If I lay down my sword by the river
may Baal12 bless my footsteps home
and forgive my sins.
* * *
In the storm, when we’d crossed the Roman
Sea, I prayed to you, Asherah,13 for you are
mistress of these waves
I prayed to you
and made a wish to Baal.
When I saw dry land, I saw you washing your
feet by the river
I saw the light falling in drops
from your ankle
and I begged El14 on high to bless the eyes that
saw you.
* * *
Warriors from Thrace with mariners from
Nineveh15 surround the consul in riverboats
all eyes on the estuary
and in the open sea, the ship is waiting.
The commander of the legion beckons to the
traveller, and his brown Carthaginians,
freed from their shackles by the sword’s
intervention,
fill the horizon with their cries.
* * *
They will all go to the hunt and I will stay
with the women who stripped sackcloth from
the children’s bodies and washed their mud-
spattered bottoms with ash and linen,
then a Sicilian slave trader will arrive with
beardless youths from Delos,16
wearing necklaces inlaid with blue stones to
