When listening to this powerful performance, in addition to Greg Nagy’s insightful commentary centered on the related words καίγομαι and καημός in the poetry of Gatsos, I think it is important to bear in mind the musical traditions behind the Rebetiko genre deployed here by Xarhákos. The performance begins with a vocal improvisation by the bouzouki player seated next to Maríka; what is referred to in Greek as amanés (αμανές), from the Turkish interjection “aman-aman” (meaning ‘alas’ or ‘mercy’). Beyond the fact that such improvisations are common in rebetiko music, in this case the amanés (repeated in the middle of the song) creates a connection between this performance and the musical culture of Ottoman Smyrna, the lost homeland of the refugee singer and musicians. This introduces many additional levels of meaning, beyond those already present in the Greek poetry of Gatsos, which form the main topic of Greg Nagy’s essay.
Both the song and improvisation are in the musical mode saba, which is particularly well suited to lamentation. The Turkish word for amanés is gazel, derived from the Arabic and Persian genre of the same name (ghazal), associated in the Ottoman context with sufi lyrical poetry. In this genre, the poet is generally presented as a lover longing for an unattainable beloved—a metaphor for God, of whom the sufi is trying to gain direct experience through love, as well as other ecstatic practices including music. Sometimes the poet is even represented as a moth circling a candle’s flame, eventually burning in it, thereby attaining union with the divine beloved through the extinction of self.
Although it is tempting to draw a connection between the candle’s flame and the fire in Gatsos’s poem, few Greek viewers of the Rebetiko film would be familiar with this particular trope in Ottoman and Persian poetry. Be that as it may, the 1922 refugees from Smyrna were certainly thought of in Greece as culturally connected to Turkey (Tourkomerítes, Τουρκομερίτες, ‘from Turkish parts’, to use the most benign expression). Their music (known as ‘Smyrna song’, Smyrnéiko, το Σμυρνέικο τραγούδι) was rooted in Ottoman musical culture, with its sufi themes of uniting through love with the eternal, in order to transcend the pain of ‘this false life’ (bu yalancı dünya, αυτός ο ψεύτικος ντουνιάς). This forms a musical and cultural context that reinforces Maríka’s powerful performance in the Rebetiko film, which is based equally in Greek poetry and Ottoman musical and cultural heritage, shared by the Christian and Muslim populations divided by war.