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The Song
lampoons, homely philosophy – but most mantinades are of love. In the
couplet the Cretan can get away from his heroic strait-jacket for a
moment, and sing, like folk singers everywhere, of love in personal
terms. Over the rizitika hovers the shadow of Venetians, corsairs,
Turks. If it is a lover, he cannot reach his beloved because the enemy
has blocked the road. He asks the cuckoo to pass on his message, since
he has had to flee the country. But in the mantinada these obstructions
have been stripped away, leaving just the singer and his love, and the
Cretan countryside, a frame in which the beloved is set, a rich source of
similes for her description.
Why does your mother want a lamp at night
When she has in her house the August moon?
Your marble hands, your sweet eyes,
Your coral lips have broken me in pieces.
Your eyes are like olives on the branch,
Your brows like a two-day-old moon.
Clear-weather eyes, light-filled, like the sky;
Sometimes raindrops fall but there are no clouds.
Mantinades are sung unaccompanied; also accompanied by the lyre
and the lute. Many Cretans know thousands of them, and some can
improvise them.
There are not many who have this gift. Those who do are helped in
two ways. While the assembled company picks up and repeats the
first half of the line, they have a little time to prepare the second
improvised half-line. Also there is a rich collection of formulae on
which they can draw. (One example: the phrase ‘Leaves of the heart’
which occurred in the mantinada at the top of this section is a formulaic
cliché – just one of a large stock of phrases on which the singer can
draw in order to fill out a line.) When two such gifted rhyme-spinners
meet at a glendi there may be a competition. They will sing mantinades
at each other; the first must sing one, and the second must cap it, sticking
to the same theme. And if one of the contestants recognizes his
opponent’s couplet, he sings scornfully, ‘My mother knew your mantin-
ades, but mine came right from the guts.’
This is amoebaean verse. The singing contests of Sicilian shepherds
in the pastoral poems of Vergil and Theocritus are similar. Two
shepherds meet They challenge each other to a match, often boasting
about their own prowess and denigrating the opponent, and they
appoint a third as judge. One of them then sings a few verses (not
always just a couplet) and the other answers in the same number of
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