Yawsep of Telkepe
author: Alessandro Mengozzi
source date: 2011
edition published: 2016-09-22-16:00
availability: Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

Yawsep of Telkepe

https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Yawsep-of-Telkepe http://syriaca.org/bibl/600 591 Yawsep Jemdāni http://syriaca.org/person/818 [person] [E.-Syr. poet, writing in Sureth, priest.]

Yawsep Jemdāni (active in the 2nd half of the 17th cent.) [Ch. of E.]

E.-Syr. poet, writing in Sureth, priest. Born in Telkepe , son of priest Jamāl al-Dīn and therefore also known as Yawsep Jemdāni. He was married and had children, at least one of whom, named Ishoʿ, became a priest and died young. Yawsep is the author of at least 4 dorekyāthā : On Divine Economy (1661/2), On Revealed Truth (a poetic rendering of a Classical Syriac hymn, 1662/3), On the Life-Giving Words (1666/7), On Parables (1665/6). His poems have been preserved as a more or less unified corpus in 9 mss. and seem to correspond to a conscious plan of re-telling the Scriptures in the modern language. However, the content is not purely narrative, but paraenetic and exegetical too. The author makes ample use of canonical and apocryphal sources, such as the Cave of Treasures (possibly via the ‘Book of the Bee’ by Shlemon of Baṣra ) and Pseudo-Methodius.

Sources

A. Mengozzi, A story in a truthful language (CSCO 590; 2002), 61–6, 121. (incl. further references)
A. Mengozzi, ‘Littérature néo-syriaque et Islam. Échos de l’Apocalypse syriaque du pseudo Méthodios dans les premiers poèmes néo-araméens (Iraq du Nord, XVIIe siècle)’, in SymSyr IX, 349–62.

Alessandro Mengozzi