Dialogues in Rhyme: The Performative Contexts of Cretan Mantinádes

In Crete, a tradition of rhyming couplets, the mantinádes, is still widely used to shape one's thought into a sharper, more expressive form. These short, communicative poems contain two rhyming fifteen-syllable lines and a full, independent meaning. Even today, new poems are constantly composed and new and old poems are sung and recited in a wide range of performance contexts. Until the 1980s, this poetic model was extensively used in feasts and other singing events, as well as in the casual verbal discourses of the oral village communities. During the last thirty years, the society and the ways of communication have undergone major changes in Crete. Although oral composition and performances continue to take place, it is more likely that an outsider encounters these couplets today as songs performed by professional musicians, in written form, or in daily TV and radio shows. However, one of the chief means of understanding the way local people mentally contextualize even these modern performances is to return to the oral arenas. Some of these still exist as current practices, whereas some are present mentally since they have been lived through by all adult generations. The main aim in this article is to explore the basis for the local experience of meaning and creativity associated with the poetic language of mantinádes with regard to the appearance of the poems in the different kinds of performances.

Similar local models of short, contextually extemporized poems have been common in most societies, but just how they function as communication and self-expression is less comprehensively known and researched. Today, most of these traditional, short poetic languages have already disappeared; mantinádes in Crete still provide a good opportunity to observe how a communicative, versatile oral poetic language works. Even if many collective forms of oral communication are already remote to contemporary citizens, many individuals continue this verbal tradition. Moreover, the disciplines focusing on verbal arts provide today a good ground for understanding communicative performances. Methodologically, the research of two anthropologists, Michael Herzfeld (1981; 1985a:141-49; 1985b) and Charles Briggs (1988), has been especially influential on short, conversational forms. They both emphasized that the local focus in the use of these verbal forms is on situational meaning and communicative creativity. The objective of my research is to show how, in addition to being a vehicle for communicative creativity, the poetic model is also a remarkable vehicle for self-expression and artistic creativity in the composition of poems. This side of the poetic tradition serves as a bridge when entering modern society.

My acquaintance with the Cretan tradition dates from a period of studies as an exchange-student at the University of Crete in Réthymno in 1997. Since then I have returned many times and spent several years conducting fieldwork.¹ This paper, and the forthcoming dissertation, is largely based on participative, dialogic, long-term fieldwork and focuses on the local experience among the contemporary poem-culture, with a perspective on the past as far as still recollected by the local oral history. My main experience is from central Crete, the Departments of Réthymno and Iráklio, but I have conducted several field trips and interviews in the eastern and western parts of the island as well. From 2001, while conducting fieldwork, I have lived in a small village in the Milopótamos valley, in the Department of Réthymno. I will refer to this locale here as the "Village."

A view of the Milopótamos valley and the Psilorítis mountain range.

Photo by the author.

Earlier research already attests to the creativity and multipurpose uses that are characteristic of the register: the versatile format and improvisation typical of mantinádes were structurally studied as early as in the 1930s by the Swiss ethnomusicologist, Samuel Baud-Bovy (1936). During the 1970s and 1980s, American anthropologists and folklorists conducted field research widely in the Mediterranean area, and Anna Caraveli (1982, 1985) and Michael Herzfeld (1981, 1985b; also 1985a:141-49) contributed important studies on the dynamics and meaning of the social poetic...