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‘Till dreadful death do ease my doleful state’: Structures of desire in the Cypriot sonnets1*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Sarah Ekdawi  and
Elli Philokyprou
Sarah Ekdawi
Affiliation:
St Cross College, Oxford
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Extract

‘Desire is death’, wrote Shakespeare, exploiting a commonplace of the sixteenth century love-lyric, which lies also at the crux of the anonymous sixteenth century Cypriot sonnets, published with an extensive scholarly introduction, French translation and notes, in 1952, by Thémis Siapkaras-Pitsillidès. The collection comprises one hundred and fifty-six poems, in a variety of metrical forms, some of which translate or adapt Italian originals. Thémis Siapkaras-Pitsillidès addresses the following questions: manuscript condition and origins; dating; authorship; influences, and versification. The poems are placed in categories according to metrical form, and a description of metre and rhyme-schemes is provided. More recently, Lucia Marcheselli-Loukas has made a detailed formal study arguing that the Cypriot sonnets show considerable originality of versification and made a significant contribution to the formation of the Modern Greek literary Koine. In this paper, we shall examine the themes and structures of one of the best-represented metrical forms in the collection: the sonnet.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 18 , 1994 , pp. 82 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1994

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References

2. William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXLVII [My Love is as a fever, longing still…].

3. Siapkaras-Pitsillidès, Thémis, Le Petrarquisme en Chypre. Poèmes d’amour en dialecte chypriote, d’après un manuscrit du XVIième siècle, Texte établi et traduit avec le concours de Hubert Pernot (Athènes 1952).Google Scholar

4. Marcheselli-Loukas, Lucia, : Modelli ritmici dell’ endecasillabo cipriota’, 21 (1991) 316–346.Google Scholar

Other studies on the subject ( Pecoraro, V., ‘Primi appunti sul Canzoniere Petrarchesco di Cipro’, Atti del I Convegno Nazionale di Studi Neogreci, 97–127 Google Scholar; Mathiopoulou-Tornaritou, E., ‘Lyrik der Spätrenaissance auf Zypern. Beobachtungen und Notizien zum Codex Marc. Gr. IX, 32’, Folia Neohellenica 7 (1985-6) (63–159)Google Scholar are not quoted in this paper because our focus is on the structure of the texts rather than on their origins and dating or on problems concerning the manuscript. For the same reason we do not refer to the other editions of the Cypriot poems by Siapkaras-Pitsillidès (1975, and 1976 [the latter in Greek]), which we have, however, taken into account. Moreover, since we are not dealing with the issue of translation or adaptation of the Italian originals, we do not provide any relevant information concerning the poems we have selected for close reading in this paper.

5. is translated into French by Siapkaras-Pitsillidès as ‘amour’; it is also used in the poems themselves to translate ‘amor(e)’ In rendering it here as ‘desire’, we are attempting to preserve the distinction between and which exists in the sonnets themselves.

6. The sonnets numbered 6-14, 16, 17 and 23 in the edition.

7. The reference ‘sonnet 14’ and subsequent similar references to other sonnets are employed only for purposes of convenience and brevity; the full reference would be: ‘the poem numbered 14 in the edition, which is in sonnet form’.