Paraklausithyron

Nir Stern

The paraklausithyron across time and space: songs and poems of Mediterranean sub-cultures

This blog post is meant to offer a quick look at a topos of classical literature: the paraklausithyron, a serenade by a closed door sung by the exclusus amator, the male lover who is shut outside the house of his (often non-reciprocating) female lover.

I wish to discuss this figure in a context broader than classical literature, which is why I will narrate briefly how I arrived at this thought and present you with some cultural background that most of this post’s readers, I believe its safe to assume, are missing. And so, with the risk of coming across as somewhat self-centred, let me start with myself.

I have been listening to Greek music ever since my early teenage years. Long before I encountered Pindar or Sappho, before I was baffled with terms such as trochaics and anapaests, or read about Pan’s syrinx and Hermes’ chelys lyre, I was deeply enchanted by the sounds of the bouzouki and baglamas, the quiet movements of the zeibekiko dancer and the fast rhythm of the tsifteteli. In truth, it took a few good years before I knew these modern terms as well. Nevertheless, without knowing more than two or three words in Greek (modern Greek, that is, and for the purposes of this post, ‘Greek’ will stand for its modern variant), I imbibed this music as the denizens of a Piraeus taverna quaff their ouzo, raki, and retsina.

The reader may query what connects an Israeli teenager from Jerusalem (not even on the Mediterranean coast!) and the music of Athenian, Smyrnian, and Thessalonikian cafés and taverns.

The answer, in the title of a hit 1990 Hebrew song, is The Voices of Piraeus. Although I was only 4 years old at the time, and probably only heard it (or at least listened to it) years later, the song embodies the allure which the voice of Greek music has for the Israeli ear (as well as my own private pair). Israel, as one journalist has put it, is in fact quite obsessed with Greek music;[1] Israeli tourists visit Greece by the hundreds of thousands every year,[2] and the best Greek musicians and singers perform year-round in Israel (there is even a Wikipedia page in English [and Greek] titled “Greek music in Israel”).[3] Although this love story has many protagonists, its origin can be traced to a man called Aris San.

Αριστείδης Σεϊσανάς (Aristides Saisanas) was a Greek musician from Kalamata who moved to Israel in the late 1950s and began to sing and play in the night clubs of Jaffa. In mainland Greece, the advent of the electric guitar changed the way musicians played the classical bouzouki (a classical string instrument). Mirroring this change, San played his electric guitar as if it was a bouzouki. Search for “Bum Pam” by San on YouTube – his magical bouzouki-like guitar is nothing less than magnificent. San’s music enchanted the audience, marking a watershed moment in Israeli pop music for embracing the Greek sound. This is an influence, as mentioned, that still persists.

Yet, this is not the whole story.

The internal culture and identity politics of Israel (then and now) made it so that Greek music would be associated with the culture of what was then called ‘the Second Israel’.

This was the Israel of the lower-classes, constituted mainly of first- and second-generation immigrant Israelis who came from non-European countries: Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Turkey, the Balkans and all that is in between.[4] Israeli leadership and the intelligentsia were guilty of assuming the false ideals of European Orientalism. These ideals supposed the superiority of ‘The West’ and the inferiority of northern-African, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean culture (Jewish, or not). What was, and is, called in Hebrew “Eastern music” was the music of the lower classes. Even today, when ethnic problems (at least in respect to this particular ethnic issue) have diminished, this so-called “Eastern music” can still be spoken of as representative of a sub- or counterculture.

We can now return to (not yet ancient) Greece and its own music. Somewhat belatedly (a crude understatement, admittedly) I decided to educate myself a little more in my beloved music, and what better time to do so than the term break? I borrowed two books about Greek music from our lovely Faculty: Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek sub-culture; songs of love, sorrow, and hashish, by Gail Holst, and Elias Petropoulos’ Songs of the Greek Underworld: The Rebetika Tradition (translated from Greek by Ed Emery). As is clear from the titles, the specific genre of Greek music I decided to read about, ρεμπέτικα (re(m)betika), is one which was characterized as a part of a counterculture, of a ‘Second Greece’.

A trip to Exeter and back provided me with the opportunity to study them both, which proved pleasant reading (though Petropoulos’ book smacks of anachronism and poor scholarship). I was more than delighted to find out that both books offer an anthology of rebetika songs – most of them are now lost, since only the zenith of the genre (c. the ‘20s and ‘30s) coincided with recording devices. One in particular caught this reader’s eye:

ΑΝΟΙΞΕ ΓΙΑΤΙ ΔΕΝ ΑΝΤΕΧΩ

Το παράθυρο κλεισμένο, σφαλισμένο, σκοτεινό.

Για ποιο λόγο δεν ανοίγεις, πεισματάρα, να σε δω;

Άνοιξε, άνοιξε, φιατί δεν αντέχω,

φτάνει πια να με τυρανάς.

Ξεροστάλιασα στ’αγιάζι, ώρες να σου τραγουδώ.

Η καρδιά μου φλόγες βγάζει, μα δεν βγαίνεις να σε δω.

Άνοιξε, άνοιξε, φιατί δεν αντέχω,

φτάνει πια να με τυρανάς.[5]

OPEN UP, I CAN’T BEAR IT

The window closed, bolted, dark.

Stubborn girl, why don’t you open up so I can see you?

Open up, open up, I can’t bear it anymore,

you’ve tormented me for long enough.

I’ve waited in the frost, singing to you for hours.

My heart’s on fire, but you don’t come out.

Open up, open up, I can’t bear it anymore,

you’ve tormented me for long enough.

(Giannis Papaioannou; trans. Gail Holst).

I want to read this song alongside two Hebrew songs (or rather, verses), from the same cultural milieu into which Greek music found a place from the ‘50s onwards in Israel. Then, by turning the gaze to their classical predecessor, I shall make a few observations and raise a few questions. But first, some Hebrew:

Come to the Window - Eyal Golan and Ethnix (1997); my translation.

(4th verse)

Come to the window,

I have waited for three seasons, and now winter’s coming

In wind and rains, I shall persist singing,

I shall do everything for you

In wind and rains, even in a hundred years,

I shall try to conquer your heart

Marlen – Zohar Argov (1982); my translation.

(2nd verse)

For nights and days I stood in front of her window and sang a sorrowful serenade.

I sent her flowers, and a thousand smiles,

I wrote her words of love…

(4th verse)

In a cold wet night I stood in front of her house,

I saw a man going up the stairs.

Suddenly the light was shut, I shuddered,

Even a grown man is allowed to cry.

צאי אל החלון -

(בית רביעי)

צאי אל החלון,

שלוש עונות חיכיתי, ועכשיו רואים שחורף מתקרב

ברוח ובגשמים, אני אמשיך לשיר שירים,

אעשה הכל למענך

ברוח ובגשמים, גם בעוד מאה שנים,

אנסה לכבוש את לבבך

מרלן

(בית שני)

עמדתי לילות וגם ימים מול חלונה ושרתי סרנדה עצובה.

שלחתי לה פרחים ואלף חיוכים,

כתבתי לה מילים של אהבה...

(בית רביעי)

בלילה קר וגם רטוב עמדתי מול ביתה,

ראיתי איש עולה במדרגות.

פתאום כבה האור, רעדתי מקור,

גם לאיש גדול מותר לבכות.

The similarities are immediately evident. The speaker, a man, stands outside wishing, if not to come in the house of the woman he desires, then at least for her to reveal herself to him. Alas, she remains inside with the window shut. He stands outside in the cold and the rain, with nothing but his song of misery, intending to wait for her to have a change of heart – a heart that he wishes ‘to conquer’.

To anyone who has ever read Catullus or any of the Latin elegists such as Tibullus or Propertius, this image is familiar. Since I am running out of space, and since the ancient poetry is readily available, instead of focusing on similarities in wording I shall bring up in summary several of the more important characteristics of the exclusus amator theme. These will be readily recognizable in the examples from the Israeli and Greek songs presented above. Let us start with some Latin to get the sense of the situation as envisioned by the elegists as they encounter ‘a hard, firm door shut by a bolt’ (clauditur et dura ianua firma sera, Tibullus, 1.2.6); how similar this door is to the window in Papaioannou’s song.

The poetic personae of the love elegists, and their predecessor Catullus, also spend whole nights in the cold in front of the shut door of their lover as they long for her to let them in: ‘midnights grieve me, the setting stars grieve me, the prostrate, | and the cold breeze grieves me with the freezing morning’ (me mediae noctes, me sidera prona iacentem | frigidaque Eoo me dolet aura gelu;, Propertius, 1.16.23-4). Their love is all consuming, and they care for nothing else, yet it makes them miserable and they are burnt by it. They want their lover all for themselves and are jealous of any other male presence (Propertius, 2.1). Yet they cannot do much about this, as their lover is in complete control of them. She is, in the Latin, domina, and they are in a state of servitude because of their love; this is their servitium amoris (hic mihi servitium video dominamque paratam, Tibullus, 2.4.1). It is also a militia amoris, the battlefield of love, so to speak, and military imagery abounds: e.g. ‘not with words the door opens conquered’ (nec verbis victa patescit | ianua, 1.5.67-8).

There’s much to add here, but there is no need to labour the point. These poetic personae share an experience and a language over time. To what extent what we see here is a case of classical Reception, I do not venture to say. At the most, this is a case of cultural osmosis and these are iterations of the same idea which was transmitted through the ages. Yet if by ‘Reception’ we mean a connection that can be proved (by any method) to exist between one artistic creation to another, I am unable to say that this is indeed the case here.[6] The mere similarity, however, raises a few questions, with which I would like to draw this post to its conclusion.

These poems/songs share more than an experience and the literary means of transmitting it. As mentioned, both the Greek and the Israeli examples belong within a sub-culture or counterculture in their society of origin.

This is also true of the Roman elegists. Successful and highly educated as they were, their choice of committing themselves to the life of poetry, even love poetry, immediately set them against contemporary expectations of the Roman male. Their militia amoris substitutes the actual military service a Roman man should ideally undertake. The all-consuming nature of their love keeps them away from their duties (officia) of political life. Even more outrageous, they forego their power by subjugating themselves to a lady-master, a domina. In a world in which the dominus is, literally, the master of the house, they are now slaves. In its own way, therefore, Roman love elegy is just as much a poetry of counterculture.

Yet are these men, ancient, modern, and contemporary, really as weak and powerless as their poetic personae proclaim? The answer, to my mind, is no. But how? Scholars of Latin Elegy, from the late ‘80s onwards, tell us that the puellae of the texts were not real women but rather poetical constructions. They exist only within the world of the poem to serve the poet’s need to reconcile what in the real world are irreconcilable societal values and norms of the Roman male relationship with the matrona on the one hand and the meretrix on the other: ‘amorous plentitude with social recognition, poetic perfection with political legitimacy, law with transgressive desire’ (Miller, in Thorsen, 2013, 178). Not only were real Roman women less powerful than these poets, but even their portrayal as dominating and all-powerful is merely another way in which they are subjugated to the use and needs of the male poet.

What we know of the Greek rebetes’ attitude towards women presents us with a similar picture. Holst writes that they all had several mistresses, ‘many of them whores’. If they were married, their wives would have remained at home to bear and raise the children. The women of their desire ‘often had a measure of independence’ which resulted from their ability to earn money as prostitutes. The songs portray them as torturers, jealous, cold, and unfaithful. While on the other hand, ‘Gypsies and oriental women […] are pictured as warmer and more exotic’ (Holst, 2006, 60). Again, all of this is familiar to the reader of the Latin elegists and their world of the matrona-meretrix dichotomy. Is it safe to assume, then, that rebetika women are also just poetic constructions, only partially based on real figures, who in reality had no such power over men? It seems this can be deduced from their Latin predecessors.

Finally, the Israeli variant. Again, one might be tempted to believe that these singers are indeed weak and powerless with respect to those women who keep them outside. For example: Argov, the performer of the second song above, rose to his short-lived success from an impoverished background. He was an orphan who lost his father to alcoholism, and he grew up in a society that indeed looked down on him and his ilk. He was a severe drug abuser who committed suicide by hanging himself in his prison cell. According to one biographical movie, on the night before his final arrest he sat for some hours at the doorstep of his ex-wife and the mother of his son. However, and without diminishing the gravity of these life circumstances, we also know that just before his meteoric rise to success Argov spent a year in prison for the rape of a woman. In his court trial he said: “there is no woman who doesn’t want it”, “it’s all a matter of tactics” (a horrid notion, to say the lease, which itself recalls Ovid’s suggestions in Ars amatoria).

Of late, Eyal Golan, the performer of the first song above, was also accused of statutory rape. He was acquitted, yet his father, a member of his entourage, was not. Golan’s habit of asking his female fans to perform sexual acts with himself and people of his entourage is currently a matter of hot public debate.

What can we learn from all this? Coming themselves from the lower classes or, more so in the case of the Roman elegist, members of the elite, yet constituting a counterculture – finding it impossible to reconcile their desire with social norms – these men conceive of themselves as weak and tormented. Yet the poetic figure of the dominant and all-powerful woman is a figment of the poets’ imagination, based but scarcely on any real-life model of the women in their lives. Reading these poems of Mediterranean sub-cultures from across time and space together perhaps teaches us about the filtering of poetic representations and language through the ages. Yet, more importantly, it teaches us something more about the dynamics of cultural osmosis (or indeed Reception, if that is the case): the adoption of a literary trope and language is never simply due to its aesthetic qualities. It also has to do with the social and cultural situation of the receiving culture. The literary representation of this experience, what modern cultures seem to have received from the ancients, was not put into use because these men experienced any such relationships with women. They were in use because these men felt themselves powerless within their society and, in an attempt to express this powerlessness, they turned to a set of ideas which made its way through antiquity to modernity by some means. For us, the readers, the accumulative lesson seem to be that when we read of powerless (poetic) male figures, we should always look for even more powerless (real) female figures.

A grim, if unsurprising conclusion. Yet, not forgetting this conclusion, I hope you might be able to go and listen to some of these songs and enjoy them still.

Nir Stern

Gold, B. K. (ed.) A Companion to Roman Love Elegy. England: Wiley-Blackwell (2012).

Holst, G. Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek Sub-Culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish4. Greece: Denise Harvey (1975; 2006).

Petropoulos, E. Songs of the Greek Underworld: The Rebetika Tradition. E. Emery (trans.). London: Saqi Books (2000).

Thorsen, T. S. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2013).

[1] E. Sagi Bizawi, “What is the meaning of the Israeli obsession with Greek Music and what is behind it?”, Haaretz, 12 Dec. 2015 (in Hebrew).

[2] https://www.amna.gr/en/tourism/article/334475/More-than-700-000-Israelis-will-visit-Greece-in-2019

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_music_in_Israel

[4] The important factor here is ethnic. The majority of the Jews expulsed in 1492 from the Hispanic peninsula resettled in North African, Middle Eastern, and Eastern Mediterranean countries. In a gross oversimplification of inner Israeli ethnic discourse, those who trace their ancestry to these expulsed families are called Sfaradi Jews (Sfarad in Hebrew means Spain) and they share customs, culture, and language (historically) that distinguish them from Jewish people descended from Central or Eastern European countries. All this is meant to explain why Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans are taken as non-European.

[5] Fortunately, we can still listen to the great Sotiria Bellou performing this song in a recording from 1948: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHPdaeABkQw

[6] Nor did I find any comments about this in either of the above-mentioned books or in the companions to Latin elegy where Reception is discussed.