Bahr ajdar. Mar verde

Caliph al-Hakam II (915-976) “was blind for Subh’s love”, as Ibn Hazm affirms in his universal Tawq al-hamama / El collar de la paloma, a book translated into Spanish by Emilio García Gómez, published with a prologue by José Ortega y Gasset. However, more than blinded by her husband, Subh was blinded by al-Mansour, who introduced her at court, eventually almost sharing power with him, until his death in 999. What is the point of this? The point is that Subh was a Basque, born in the Gulf of Biscay, she was named Aurora or Alba, and her name was translated into Arab as Subh; and the rascal al-Mansour was so much in love with Aurora that he used to call the Cantabrican Sea the Green Sea, a name which had been used before but was either neglected or very rarely used at the time. It is surely not a mistake to speak of the Cantabrican Sea under the title of the well known line from García Lorca’s Romancero gitano: “Verde que te quiero verde.” “Green, how I want you green”.