There are people I wish I knew more about. People such as Kitsa Korina who, as near as I can tell, recorded only through the mid- to late-1930s, as she moved from light song and popular tangos to rebetiko. Included in her repertoire was this song, one of the toughest, strongest songs by a woman.
(Right off the top: I haven’t translated the title of this into English because I can’t. I’ve come across a fairly consistent translation of “magissa” as witch, but I suspect there is more nuance to the slang use of the word. As for “matsaragissa,” online translators unhelpfully translate is as “matsaragissa.”)
Before we get to the song, what I have found about Kitsa Korina is extremely limited. She was likely from Thessaloniki (based on her nickname Thessalonikia), although I can find no birth date or place online. Kitsa Korina is not a typical Greek-sounding name, so I assume it was adopted somewhere along the line.
In terms of recordings, YouTube has about a dozen of her songs and they suggest a trajectory from tangos and light popular song in 1934 and 1935, to Smyrneika and Piraeus-style rebetiko in 1936 and then more than half-a-dozen rebetiko recordings in 1937. She sounded a lot like Roza Eskenazi, recorded the works of major rebetiko composers, and appeared on record with Kostas Roukounas and Markos Vamvakaris. (Vamvakaris doesn’t mention her in his autobiography, although he did write that he performed with a number of women, whose names he had forgotten, during the late 1930s.)
The tune to Magissa Matsaragissa is known by at least one other name: I am a junkie, recorded by Roza Eskenazi in 1935, with a different set of lyrics. Korina recorded her version the same year. (The song was created by Smyrna refugees Sosos Ioannidis and Emilios Savvidis. Ironically, given the words, lyricist Savvidis was as an opponent of hashish songs and a supporter of the censorhip-loving Metaxas dictatorship.)
Ezkenazi’s I am a junkie is about using heroin to blunt the harsh realities of the world. Korina’s take is just plain tough:
I keep a revolver in Gazi when I walk,
And I have the policeman’s ticket, To throw them in the search..
Once again, the difficulties of finding translations from almost century-old slang make exact translation difficult, but you get the idea – you don’t want to mess with her.
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