CONTENTS
Mani: travels in the southern Peloponnese
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Author: Fermor Patrick Leigh (b.1915)
Year: 1958
She gave a resigned sigh, laid the sock she was knitting in her lap and folded her arms. After collecting herself for a few seconds she began slowly singing in a high thin voice. It was a strange, unseizable tune in a minor key and unspeakably sad and beautiful. Whether it was the music or the words, I soon felt a tightening of the throat and pricking behind the eyes and that odd crawling sensation of the nape and scalp that writers must mean when they talk of the hair standing on end. When she had finished, her eyes were full of tears. I begged her to sing it again. I transcribe it here, translated word for word, so that nothing should be lost in the attempt to put it into verse:
He shone among thousands like the sun,
He was a moon among a hundred thousand,
He was the bravest of all the officers.
Such a bright star should never have fallen to the ground.
It was more fitting for him to dine at a king's table,
To eat and drink with a company of a hundred,
And when he walked abroad for a thousand five hundred to follow him.
But it was his destiny to fall to earth here at Limeni
When our allies flew to fight the barbarian Germans.
The English pilot and his comrade fell into the sea here
And the world and the people are weeping his sad death.
One was washed ashore here, sorely wounded,
And the word ran from village to village:
'An Englishman is lying on the shore.'
The whole world ran with bandages and lint
To heal the captain's woe and save his life.
But the young man was dead.
So they joined his hands and closed his eyes
And now the whole wide world is weeping;
Weeping for his dew-sprinkled youth
Which was as clear as the cool waters of May.
Bravery was in his step, his motion was that of an eagle,
His face was that of an angel, his beauty like the Virgin Mary's.
His bravery lays us deep in his debt,
For it was for the honour of Greece that he came.
What will his mother and his sisters do without him?
We arrayed our fearless captain like a bridegroom
And men armed with guns bore him along the streets,
And all the world brought wreaths of laurel
So that this hero should be buried, as it was fitting,
Among the olive trees of Saint Saviour.
Let us pray the All-Mighty One and the All-Holy Virgin
That a bomb may fall into the camp of the Germans
And blow their fortress to broken pebbles.
But let us not be touched or harmed
And let the English fly safe home again.
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