60
Dehqan and Mengozzi
Aramaic poet of whom we have an autograph collection of poems
and who often indulges in autobiographical details. These facts may
very well be interconnected. He may have followed his poetic and
linguistic inspiration in making a collection of poems, possibly in-
tended for private use. On the other hand, late East-Syriac and
Neo-Aramaic poems are usually preserved in miscellaneous manu-
scripts or anthologies that have religious content and liturgical
function. Rather than Kurdish, authors were probably more in-
clined to use Classical Syriac, Arabic or, marginally, Neo-Aramaic
in dealing with biblical, theological or hagiographical matters, and
to avoid autobiography in textual supports for public celebra-
tions.
18
D
AVID OF
B
ARAZNE
19
On the life of David of Barazne we have both direct and indirect
sources of information. Direct information is provided in the colo-
phons of the numerous manuscripts he copied as well as in his po-
ems. David, son of Yoḥannan, son of Nisan, son of Gorgo, of the
Qardaḥe family, was born around 1820 in the village called
Barzāne, in the Zibār district. In 1841 and 1844 he lived in Ainka-
wa, first as a layman and later as a deacon. During a travelling sem-
inar of a few months, he was trained as a priest while he accompa-
nied the bishop ‘Mar Yusep’, who was probably Joseph Audo,
bishop of Amadiya in 1833-47 and then elected as Patriarch Joseph
VI. After a few days in Alqosh, he followed his bishop to Dehok,
where he was ordained, and then went to the villages around
script: paradigms and texts in the ms. 133.1, word list in the ms. 136 (Mo-
sul 1882-83). On these Kurdish Garshuni texts see also K. Fuad, Kurdische
Handschriften, Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland
30 (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1970), 121-6.
18
For an overview on the linguistic policies of the East-Syriac
churches in the 16th-19th centuries, see H. L. Murre-van den Berg, “Clas-
sical Syriac, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic in the Church of the East and the
Chaldean Church between 1500 and 1800,” in Aramaic in its Historical and
Linguistic Setting, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz:
Veröffentlichungen der Orientalischen Kommission 50, ed. H. Gzella and
M. L. Folmer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 335-51.
19
J. M. Fiey, Assyrie Chrétienne (Beirut: Imprimerie catholique, 1965),
vol. I, 169-71.
A Kurdish Garshuni Poem
61
Zakho with him. The place where he stayed longest seems to have
been Bidaro, where he spent five months in 1846.
When the bishop sent him home, the priest David began his
peregrinations and a life of hardship. As the poet sadly says of him-
self, he buried one of his family in each of the villages where he
lived and worked. Misery and mourning did not prevent him from
copying many manuscripts, a dozen of which have survived.
20
The bishop was informed that Kurdish aghas of Zibār had at-
tacked David’s native village and sent the priest and his family to
Khardes in the Sapsapa district. He remained there nine years, dur-
ing which eight of his relatives died. He lost other dear ones in
Ḥerpa and witnessed a Kurdish raid on Ṣanaya d-Naḥla. He left
Zibār and the ‛Aqra region and settled in Kanifalla, in the Gomel
Valley (region of Amadiya), but his misfortune followed him. His
wife died there and in 1865 he lost the only son who had survived,
the beloved and learned Anton, who had helped him a great deal.
The last manuscript David copied is a breviary dated 1871.
In the biographical sketches that conclude his presentation of
Sureth poetry, Father Jacques Rhéthoré describes David as a good
priest and a talented poet. The French Dominican missionary must
have known the poet personally and tells us about the end of his
life. The famine that ravaged the Mosul region in 1880 did not
spare poor David. He asked for help and protection from his
friends in Mosul, but hunger and privation had severely weakened
him and he died in the hospital of the Dominican mission, sur-
rounded by the love and care of nuns and missionaries. According
to Rhétoré, David’s poems enjoyed a certain popularity and six of
them were included in the Recueil de chants religieux en langue chaldéenne
vulgaire, published in Mosul in 1886. However, Rhétoré observes
that the manuscripts used for that edition were of rather poor qual-
ity.
21
Given David’s tormented existence, it is not surprising that his
poems abound in themes such as sadness, the sinful life, death, the
poet’s miserable life, the death of his beloved son Anton, the vanity
of this world and the coming of the Anti-Christ at the end of the
world. These are in fact very common motifs in late East-Syriac
20
D. Wilmshurst, The Ecclesiastical Organisation of the Church of the East,
1318-1913, CSCO 582, Subsidia 104 (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 807.
21
B. Poizat, Jacques Rhétoré. La versification en soureth (araméen contempo-
rain), CSCO 647, Subsidia 131 (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 64-5.