Overview

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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9781913043292

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After translating the poems Catherine Cobham wrote: These poems say so much in such concentrated lyrical ways about exile, empire, migration, borders - not to mention the visceral evocation of northern English weather. While Nouri Al-Jarrah has commented: Mythologies can no longer be reproduced as they are without a reinterpretation. The poet must range between the epic text, in its own time, and today Professor of Arabic at Rome's LUISS Guido Carli Francesca Maria Corrao writes: Nouri Al-Jarrah is not an antihero but a modern hero representative of a new generation in search of space to create a future in a world filled with the overwhelming presence of the fathers Writing about an earlier collection, Abdo Wazen, cultural editor of Independent Arabia, says: Nouri Al-Jarrah's poem, A Boat to Lesbos, immediately found its place at the vanguard of the tragic poetry that has been written within Syria, in the Syrian exile and in the Arab world. The work has become part of world poetry, not just through the medium of translation but through its poetic lexicon, which fuses the universal, as expressed through the legacy of ancient Greece, with the Syrian and Arab dimension.

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"Syrian poet Nouri al-Jarrah was born in Damascus in 1956. He attracted attention with his debut collection of poems, ""The Boy"", published in Beirut in 1982 and has become an influential poetic voice on the Arab literary scene. Since 1986 he has lived in London, publishing 14 further collections, and founding and editing a number of Arabic literary magazines. His poetry draws on diverse cultural sources, and is marked by a special focus on mythology, folk tales and legends. Selected poems have been translated into a number of Asian and European languages, and some collections have been published in French, Spanish and Farsi. Catherine Cobham teaches Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and has translated works of a number of Arab writers, including Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Hanan al-Shaykh and Fuad al-Takarli."

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