Pervivències del mite antic a la cançó demòtica grega: possibilitats i exemples

Abstract

To the Greek literary genre known as "dhmotikov tragouvdi", “demotic song”, belongs a great number of anonymous popular songs, with an average length of thirty verses, generally narrative in character, and not easily determined as belonging to a concrete historical period. Although the latest periods of splendor were those of the 17th and specially 18th centuries, we can assume that the roots of this genre reach back to the Antiquity. Starting from this premise, in some demotic songs –the so-called "paralogev" – vestiges of ancient Greek myths can be detected; this paper tries to approach this genre, as a reflection on the literary character of Greek myth, and its survival or resurgence, based on a series of samples with the corresponding translations.