free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Cretan Renaissance
And this is what Kornaros is after – to speak with knowledge and with
style.
The poet George Sepheris, whose flexible fifteen-syllable line has its
origin in the Erotokritos, wrote a masterly study of the poem, which
illuminates not only the value of it and its meaning for the Greeks, but
also Sepheris’s own views on poetry. He tells how he first came across
the poorly printed pamphlets which circulated in the later years of the
last century.
[The Erotokritos] circulated among the humble classes, in the islands, in the
eparchies of the Greek state, in the great metropolises of the nation. Usually it
was sold by pedlars, I remember, as a boy in Smyrna; every afternoon at the
same time, the same voice in the street: ‘I have all sorts of books! Erotokritos
and Aretousa! The story of Halima! . . .’ In those days these wretched publications
delighted me. On the cover, Erotokritos, a young hero with a savage and
somehow cross-eyed look, . . . For me, he was the same soul as Digenes and
Alexander the Great – triplet brothers. If I had been asked I could not have
distinguished one from the other, nor could I have found anything to distinguish
Aretousa from Alexander the Great’s gorgon-mermaid. Both of these women
were tormented by a great lack. What sort of lack it was, I could not then have
understood. I understood however that it was enough to make them naturalized
citizens of the world which surrounded me. And this world – workers at
the vine, seamen – was tormented, I saw, by a great lack: later I understood
how it was the lack of freedom.
I quote at length to show how Erotokritos works on Sepheris, and
other Greeks, on more than one level. As well as being a poem it is a
national poem. Sometimes I think that a nation which has not been
oppressed cannot get this sort of pleasure from poetry; for as a nation
it has no ‘lack’, no yearning or wish, to be fulfilled or embodied in
poetry. The English have no characters in whom they see embodied the
aspirations of the race. (The nearest equivalent to Digenes and Erotokritos
and Alexander would be Robin Hood and the characters of
Dickens!) For us, therefore, poetry is a personal affair. But for the
Greeks works like the Erotokritos have been a powerful force for unity,
since they have cut across class barriers; and they do this because in
them the Greeks see their national aspirations fulfilled – as when
Erotokritos defeats the terrible Caraminite, who represents the forces of
darkness threatening Hellenism, in particular the Turks,
Of course the fact that the Erotokritos is a ‘national epic’ does not
make it a good poem. It just means that some of the Greeks will overvalue
it for non-aesthetic reasons. Indeed nationalism has been one of
the forces most responsible for silliness and bad judgement in modern
59