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The Great Island
Personally, I like best some of his verses which will not last – the
ephemeral and political. For Dermitzakis is the poet laureate of his
area, and he sees it as his job to comment on the small and great events
of the world. His booklet contains lines in praise of Fix beer, lines about
Khrushchev and Kennedy, lines in honour of Gregory Lambrakis, the
deputy who was murdered by thugs in 1963, and some exceedingly
vigorous, threatening and optimistic lines about Cyprus.
‘Cypriots, you are far off and the sea divides us, and we cannot strike
a blow at the wild beast who torments you, at his filthy body, so as to
lay it low with Greek fists. England! Know well, the wheel turns, your
time is up, the hour is approaching. . . . And you Turks, know well
that the Christians will complete the Mass in the City!’ This, and there
is plenty more of it, is in the best abusive tradition. The mantinada is as
well suited to abuse and to obscenity as it is to love.
The lineaments of Cretan song are now clear. It is a fascinating and
frustrating subject. Frustrating because with the best will in the world
one cannot get worked up about the music. It is possible while you are
in Crete to persuade yourself of its virtues, mainly because the atomsphere
of performance is so exciting. And the dance music is pleasant
enough. But Cretan folk music cannot compare in melodic richness and
rhythmic vitality with, say, our own.
The words compare, however. Cretan poetry does not thrill like the
best of English folk poetry, with an intensity which stabs:
There’s not a swish goes round my waist
Nor a comb goes in my hair.
Neither firelight nor candle light
Can ease my heart’s despair.
Those lines, and others from our folk songs, produce in me the Housman
effect, or something like it. A shiver goes down the spine. I would
not swap these lines for any in Greek poetry. Indeed in singing the
despair of love the English poet has no peer. And the language with its
monosyllables, its flexibility of metre, seems forged for the direct
expression of the simplest and most painful feelings: ‘For love it is a
killing thing did you ever feel the pain?’
The Greek poet does not aim at this sort of stabbing thrill. The effect
of his fifteen-syllable line is cumulative (and sometimes monotonous;
the fifteen-syllable may be the glory of the Greek language – it can also
be a liability). If he sings of love he can sometimes be reflective,
impersonal, in a way which the English poet rarely could; as in this
quiet poem (which is not Cretan):
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