some kind of poet @the-cassandriad - Tumblr Blog

lucia pronounced the italian way.

she/her. lesbian. twenty & studying history. sometimes i write; more often i think about myth or alexander the great or les misérables or other historical things. please talk to me about cassandra.

ryebreadgf

zendaya wearing real 3000-year old ancient iranian earrings with no known track of provenance to the odyssey premiere. nasty work. even worse than the kim kardashian marilyn dress to me. they could have promoted modern greek jewelry designers but chose to do this instead. very tacky at best. especially in this geopolitical climate

#yeah exactly #like obviously zendaya is being styled. so not really her fault #but it’s just so representative of the way ancient cultures are viewed. because she’s not wearing greek earrings #because those are in a museum. because cradle of western civilisation etc #but iranian earrings can be remounted and worn and we don’t even know where they came from #which means exactly what i think it means i am sure #anyway. very sinister

salemwitchtrials-deactivated202

Anne Carson

escuerzoresucitado

saltoncity

can we get anne carson on hot ones

playwrongs

ANNE CARSON: The Hot Ones could be the name of a tragedy. Imagine that chorus. Chewing on spiced wings so their tears streamed down the masks and fell to the ground. If a tragic actor was crying from eating hot wings how would you know? The mask doesn't tell you. Only if he cried OTOTOTOI POPOI DA but that is his text. No dividing what is pain from what is pain. According to Aulus Gellius, the actor Polus used the urn that held his son's bones and ashes onstage. He was using grief to play grief. It does away with the problem of feigning. You can't feign spice either. Either your eyes water and you retch or you don't.

SEAN EVANS: So, are you gonna take a bite, or...?

courfeyrec

sorry i can't hang out today i'm going to the barricade. yeah it's gonna be all day sorry.

#happy barricade day #les mis

being a lesbian is one of the greatest privileges of my life. happy pride 🫶

#lesbian

you can tell i've been a bit behind re writing poetry because i forgot to put my username on the cassandra crossword poem... i will have to trust you all

#i mean let's not kid myself probably no one is stealing my poem to distribute it #not least because it's so insane

answers for my cassandra crossword poem (both languages)!

translations for the ancient greek here; please note i am not super advanced so there may be grammatical mistakes. i also did not inflict upon myself accents nor applying the last-letter-sigma change because that would have killed me. finally, note it is quite a bit more 'metatextual' than its english counterpart, because i think the language lends itself to that.

λοξιασ/λοξιας: an epithet for apollo, specifically referring to his prophetic nature and the obliqueness of those prophecies.

δοξα: a word that encompasses many things, but i'm using it as meaning common opinion/reputation/glory. cassandra remembers her higher status in public opinion and continues to associate it with her youth in troy (so: "dust and stone and an impossible breeze").

σαλοσ/σαλος: refers to the rolling motion of the sea. i'm using it more figuratively here to just mean the ocean - troy was a port city. i live near the ocean, too. i always think that cassandra would miss it amidst the rocks of mycenae.

βασανιστηριο: means torture, but can also mean figurative mental suffering. the english version presents cassandra as noticing clytemnestra and thus her fate; in ancient greek, she instead notes the suffering of the house of atreus.

ανια: divine personification of grief. is cassandra remade into grief or does grief remake her? that's up to interpretation.

αισχυλος: aeschylus, the writer of agamemnon (my favourite play and the one which much of my interpretation is made up of). leaning into this being a more metatextual poem, where cassandra envisions her ultimate "exposer" as the person who writes about her in such great detail.

ιδεα: the most metatextual. it means idea or concept. i think it's fitting to interpret cassandra as understanding her own mythology, or at least how she will be remembered. prophecy is more expansive than just the future.

(p.s., the title translates to divinely inspired, or, as translated by anne carson: godstruck godswept godnonsensical).

crossword poem (cassandra version) inspired by @kallistoriae!

the fun part of this poem is that it (should be) solvable in both english and ancient greek; after all, cassandra "speaks greek all too well". this is the reason why it's only seven clues - any more would have driven me to tears (i also picked seven because it's a number traditionally associated with apollo).

answers (both english and ancient greek) are here.