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The Cretan Renaissance
still to be found the descendants of the wretched Cretans who Found a friendly
refuge there after the capture of their country. It was these who popularized the
poem, which is composed in the natural Cretan tongue, and spread it throughout
the island, and to other places, where it appears most pleasant and graceful
to all such as read it.
The natural Cretan tongue. This is the importance of Cretan literature,
and this is what caused trouble. One Dionysius Photinus in 1818
decided to translate the Erotokritos with its ‘barbarous and almost
incomprehensible words’ into the sweeter language of his day – by
which he meant a stilted neo-classical Greek. Such tampering was not
uncommon; the prologue of Erophile begs that those who dislike the
Cretan expressions will compose their own poem instead, and not
corrupt the natural, genuine idiom of the poem as it stands. Luckily
the philistnes who wished to take away the Cretan flavour were an
intellectual minority. The people went on listening. In fact the glory of
Cretan literature is that it forged an expressive, flexible, rapid language,
dignified yet unstilted, and the fifteen-syllable line which could contain
it (the two things are inseparable). It took the poets to recognize this
– Solomos and Pa lamas, who cried shame on the nation which had still
not realized that the poet of the Erotokritos was the great and immortal
poet of the Greek nation.
‘The fact that has tragic significance,’ writes Sepheris, ‘is that after
a few years the blossoming which had given Theotokopoulos and the
line of the Erotokritos is cut down suddenly and finally. Such is the fate
of the race. Always at the frontiers of places and of epochs; as soon as
there is a blossoming in preparation, some destruction threatens it. The
endless dialogue of Greek history.’
The Erotokritos is full of a sense of the fragility of human aspirations,
as if Kornaros knew the destruction which threatened the Cretan blossoming.
And probably he did.
Whoever seeks the great things of this world,
And does not know how here he is a traveller on the road,
But takes pride in his nobility, boasts of his wealth,
I hold him a cipher, he is to be accounted mad,
These things are blossoms and flowers, they pass by, they are gone.
And the times change them, often they destroy them.
Like glass they shatter, like smoke they are gone,
They never stand unshaken, but they run away, they go. . . .
Alongside this sense of change and time, there is light. Like Vergil,
Kornaros floods his poem with light.
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