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The Great Island
Greece. And even Sepheris, I think, speaks too well of the Erotokritos, for
he is intoxicated by the history of the poem. He makes out the best
possible case for it, however – so that in the end one finds oneself
agreeing, yes, it is a marvellous poem. Even so, I wish it were not quite
so long and repetitive. But, as Sepheris says, there is no proving a poem
is good, ‘Poems are like the ancient hetairae: they appear naked in
court.’ So:
Let the days go by, let time pass,
And in time the wild beasts grow tame in the forests.
In time difficulties and hardships are lightened.
Necessities, suffering and disease are cured and made well.
In time the storms and turmoils recede
And the hot grows cold, the icy comes to the boil.
In time the clouds and mists dissolve,
And in time curses turn to great prayers.
The Erotokritos quickly established itself in Crete as a folk poem as
well as a literary epic. It acquired its own special tune for performance
by rhymadori, many of whom knew large chunks of it by heart. Some
almost certainly knew all ten thousand lines. George Psychoundakis
claims that his father, who was illiterate, knew the whole poem. Many
of the couplets of the Erotokritos are now part of the common Cretan
repertoire of manlinades; it is difficult to know whether Kornaros took
them from the folk or vice versa. In any case this popularity of the Erotokritos
is one reason for its rapid transmission and its place as the national
poem. And parts of other poems – The Fair Shepherdess and Erophile–
found their way into folk poetry as well.
The Erotokritos was written probably not many years before the Turks
took Crete, and left the island in 1669 with the refugees. ‘Should all the
Cretans be gathered together,’ wrote Marinos Bounialis in his poem on
the Cretan War, ‘There are not, I judge, ten thousand left alive from
that time, for they were killed and enslaved and parcelled out, poor
things, to various lands. . . . And if two meet, they don’t recognize each
other, only when one says, "From what place are you, stranger?" and
the other says, "From Crete", they take each other’s hands and weep.’
Such exiles, and Bounialis himself was one, carried Cretan art and
learning and literature away from the doomed island. In 1713 the first
edition of Erotokritos was printed in Venice. The editor wrote that he
had decided to print the Erotokritos:
an old poem, which is so praised and honoured in the islands of the Adriatic,
and in the Peloponnese, and indeed in the famous land of Zakynthos, where are
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