some kind of poet

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.

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.

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).