Dialogues in Rhyme: The Performative Contexts of Cretan Mantinádes

In Crete, the strong local identity has helped a communicative form of oral poetry, the mantináde, survive to the present day. Emblematic of the performance and composition of these short rhyming couplets is a multilayered dialogism—performative, referential, and textual—that also pervades modern arenas (poems are very popular in the media and even exchanged as text messages). In order to understand how dialogism is embedded in the tradition, this article presents mantinádes as traditionally sung and recited in a wide range of performative discourses.