free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
When all is said and done, as Kondylakis, Kazantzakis and Prevelakis
would be first to admit, the voice of Crete is not that of any one
writer, but that of an ‘unknown poet’; and his work is the songs which
the people have chosen as worthwhile, to preserve and pass down to
their children. It is on his cenotaph that we should lay the garlands of
honour. For his work – an anthology created through the tension which
holds between the singer and his audience – has moulded Kornaros,
Barba Pantzelios, Kondylakis, Kazantzakis, Prevelakis, Psychoundakis,
and all forgotten and unforgotten Cretans. All have a share in this
work since all constitute the audience. The Cretan culture is single.
Our share as Englishmen is of a different kind – inevitably selfconscious.
Travelling the road northwards from Kandanos one evening,
the donkey shambling in our wake, we came through a cleft in the hills
where the way winds up the right-hand side of a fertile valley. The sun
was going down, and below us in the fields an unknown labourer was
singing a mantinada:
Friendships are forgotten, loves are forgotten;
You meet in the road like strangers, like passers-by.
And I thought, one is unlikely to forget these friendships, this land; but
perhaps all the time we were strangers, passers-by.