Posterity has been unkind to the Phanariots and their urban song culture: too much hiatus, too many Turkish loanwords, too sentimental. Not reminiscent of folk poetry, not like anything written by Solomos, not Greek enough. In short: very, very bad poetry.
However, things are starting to look up for the Phanariots. There is growing interest in their songs and in the collections in which they are contained: the so-called μισμαγιές, the oldest of which date from the 1760s. Most of the Phanariot songs survive in manuscript, but some, such as the anthology of Zisis Daoutis published in 1818 (and republished in 1993 by Anteia Frantzi) or the metrical treatise of Charisios Megdanis, Καλλιόπη Παλινοστούσα (1819), found their way to the printing press. And some are found embedded in prose works, such as Rigas Velestinlis’ translation of Restif de La Bretonne (Σχολείον των ντελικάτων εραστών, 1790), Antonios Koronios’ translation of Florian (Γαλάτεια, 1796), and an original, anonymous collection of three stories, Έρωτος αποτελέσματα (1792) – henceforth EA. While Rigas has 13 songs and Koronios 26, EA offers the texts of no fewer than 132 Phanariot songs. The book under review is a scholarly edition of these 132 lyrics, with a thorough introduction and extensive commentary by Natalia Deliyannaki and a very useful glossary by Peter Mackridge.
Though the insertion of song texts in prose narratives is not uncommon in other European literatures (the best-known examples are probably Cervantes’ La Galatea and Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), EA is unusual in having so much poetry (either presented as actual songs or love letters exchanged by the protagonists). The only parallel from a comparative perspective I can think of is that of Oriental popular storytelling with its abundant use of verse to either illustrate the effects of love or hammer home a moral lesson to be drawn from the story. Given the popularity of the Thousand and One Nights and similar collections of stories in the Ottoman empire, it is reasonable to assume that if there is a link here, it is with the Orient rather than with Europe. On the other hand, if one turns to the stories of EA, one is immediately reminded of the sentimental novel of the later eighteenth century (Sterne, Rousseau, Gessner). The songs themselves are quite similar to pre-romantic European poetry, especially those in pastoral mode or Anacreontic garb, but the motifs are again oriental: the secluded garden, the rosebuds, the moth drawn to the candle, the moralizing. In other words, EA is a hybrid between East and West, and as it is one of the first fictional narratives in Modern Greek, this hybridity or cultural mishmash deserves more recognition than it has received in the past. This edition of the lyrics of EA is not only very welcome, but also very timely.
In the introduction D. briefly discusses the genre, summarizes the plots of the three stories of EA, and furnishes detailed information on the composition of the songs inserted into them. It is generally an excellent introduction, but I do not think the traditional metrical terminology D. employs allows for an accurate description of the innovative versification of the Phanariots. Rather than thinking in terms of lines divided into two by a caesura, one should understand the Phanariot metrical system as consisting of independent colons that are paired: e.g. the famous decapentasyllable consists of two colons, 8 + 7. This explains why one also finds combinations of 7 + 8 or 7 + 7 or 8 + 8. Apart from heptasyllables and octosyllables, one also finds colons consisting of 5 or 6 syllables. The colons mostly have a duple rhythm that is either rising (‘iambic’) or falling (‘trochaic’); triple rhythms (‘dactylic’, ‘anapaestic’, ‘mesotonic’) are introduced in the early nineteenth century. Whereas the colon is the basic metrical unit, the melodic phrase favoured by the Phanariots takes the form of a distich: e.g. 2 x (7 + 7).
At the end of the introduction, D. enumerates the manuscripts and editions that contain Phanariot songs also found in EA and explains that her editorial principle has been to preserve the readings of EA unless hopelessly corrupt, and to present the most important variant readings of the other text witnesses in the commentary. This is undoubtedly the right way to proceed given the textual instability of song texts (ask ten people to sing the whole text of Yellow Submarine and you will probably end up with ten different versions). The edition is executed in scholarly fashion, and the editor is to be commended for a job well done. My only complaint is that D. mentions her changes to the text of EA only in the commentary and not below the poems themselves. I think it was the late Stylianos Alexiou who introduced the unfortunate habit of abandoning the critical apparatus altogether and instead justifying editorial choices somewhere else: this means constant thumbing back and forth through the pages. It is not helpful. The commentary is a real asset to the study of Phanariot urban songs, especially because it lists the readings of two manuscripts hitherto unknown, both in the library of the Romanian Academy (nos. 925 and 927).
The glossary compiled by M. is faultless. It is the latest in a long series of valuable contributions to the field of Phanariot lexicography, which M. has now helpfully gathered in a collective volume that is freely accessible on the internet: https://anemi.lib.uoc.gr/metadata/0/8/1/metadata-1609840564-629865-29766.tkl. M.'s lexicographic explorations aim to cover the gap between Kriaras’ dictionary of medieval and early modern Greek and the various nineteenth- and twentieth-century dictionaries of Modern Greek, especially the Ιστορικό Λεξικό. May many more glossaries follow!
