free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
dialogue between the imprisoned homesick dead and the free who
live. ‘Do they still get married up there?’ ‘Do you celebrate Easter down
there?’ ‘Send us weapons to get out.’
Death is the arch enemy.
Even with so many trials, still life is sweet.
And anyone who wants Charos to come, he must be mad.
In tone this is Homeric. ‘Don’t comfort me about death,’ said the shade
of Achilles to Odysseus among the meadows of asphodel. ‘I’d rather be
a serf and work for hire for some poor man than rule over all the corpses
of the dead.’ The shades of ancient and of modem Greece are the same
hopeless creatures. And it need not surprise us that Death is regarded as
a malevolent, active and personal enemy in an island where Charos
has regularly swept through decimating the inhabitants in pestilence,
earthquake and bloody war.
As well as the rizitika there are the long historical narrative poems,
like the song of Daskaloyiannis, and the mantinades. Mantinades are at
the root of Cretan song. They are simply rhymed couplets.
Whoever hears me sing, says this is to be happy –
He no longer sees the withered leaves of his heart.
Every Cretan, even in those areas where the heroic tradition is less
strong, knows mantinades, for the good reason that the mantinada is, less
perhaps today but still indubitably, a form of language as well as a song.
Couplets or distichs are sung all over Greece under various local
names. They are the liveliest form of Greek folk song: that is, they
continue to be created after other longer forms become ossified. But
this does not mean that the couplets are a decadent ‘late’ form. There
is every reason to believe that something like the mantinada is very old.
The Cretan mantinada for instance is certainly older than its Venetian
name. The name is a simple corruption of matinada, the morning song,
the song of the after-midnight hours which corresponds to the serenata
of the early night. The matinada was what you sang under your sweetheart’s
window in the still time before dawn, with lute or guitar. The
original function survives:
Wake up, my love, the day is already dawning;
Give your little body up to the clean air.
And the mantinada is still primarily a love song. It embraces as well every
subject in the deceitful world – birth, baptism, marriage, death, burial,
dance, food, drink, eulogies of places and people, oaths, curses, jokes,
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