Epic
Erotokritos
Ερωτόκριτος
Vitsentzos Kornaros · 1713
Synopsis
In a fanciful Athens, before the Christian era, Rotokritos, son of the king's counsellor, secretly loves Princess Aretousa. He comes to sing beneath her windows without giving his name, distinguishes himself in the tournament the king has opened, then dares to ask for her hand: the king banishes him, and his daughter refuses the husband intended for her.
Context
Written around 1600 in the dialect of Sitia, the poem runs to ten thousand and twelve lines of fifteen syllables rhymed in pairs, on the pattern of the popular couplets called mantinades, and transposes into an imaginary pagan Athens the plot of Paris and Vienne, a fifteenth-century French tale by Pierre de la Cépède, known in Crete through an Italian version. The last twelve lines name their author and his birthplace: his identification rests on them. The work circulated for a century without being printed, and the first edition came only in 1713, in Venice, from Antonio Bortoli. Robert Davreu produced a verse translation of it with José Corti in 2007, and there is another, in prose, by Denis Kohler.
Who it is for
Five cantos, in a seventeenth-century Cretan language. The French version reads like a chivalric tale and requires no prior knowledge.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the founding poem of modern Greece: Solomós, Palamás and Seferis celebrated it, and Cretan shepherds still recite hundreds of its lines by heart.