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Yelizaveta Savina - “Princess Tamara,” a triptych based on M.Y. Lermontov's poem “The Demon.”
favorite films in 2025
top five movies I’ve seen this year in no particular order
1 kuroneko dir: kaneto shindo 2. possession Dir: Andrzej Żuławski 3.suspiria dir:Dario Argento . 4 double Suicide Dir : masahiro shinoda 5. Iphigenia dir : Michael Cacoyannis
6.blue angel dir:Josef von Sternberg
7.Thorne of blood dir: akira kurosawa
8.Pandora’s box dir G.W pabst .9 Nosferatu dir: F. W. Murnau 10 .merry christmas mr lawrence dir: nagisa oshima
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Throne of Blood (1957) | dir. Akira Kurosawa
Source: amatesura
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speaking of classical pun names, i've been revisiting my euripides' helen translation recently and REALLY struggling to deal with the pun on her name and helein (as in the aorist infinitive of haireō, to seize/capture/sack/destroy/ruin etc. and e.g. of both cities and women). you may recognize this pun from aeschylus' agamemnon, where she is helenaus, helandros, heleptolis, "destroyer" of ships, men, cities but handily preserved in translation as "hell to ships" etc. but the euripidean instances are more difficult to render punnily:
551-552: when menelaus first appears to helen and she doesn't recognize him in his shipwrecked squalor, she thinks he's an agent of theoclymenus who "wants to give me to the king, having captured me [m' helōn]." in a play with so much metamythical preoccupation over what makes a helen the helen (can helen be helen if she never went to troy and waited faithfully to menelaus the whole time?), the best translation to my mind is something along the lines of "he wants to make a helen out of me." but as my major goal for this translation is to make the metamythical doubling (helen/eidolon) questions more legible to the average reader, this approach is a too inside baseball-y. what's the way to bring out the meta effect without requiring that the reader already be in on the joke?
1493-1494: a more straightforward example. the chorus says menelaus has sacked the city of troy helōn. "raised hell" builds on the aeschylean precedent but is it as impactful without the repetition and additional context that establishes it as a helen name pun?
1581: the bulk of the helen/helein/helōn puns come in the final movements of the tragedy, when a messenger reports helen and menelaus' escape from egypt. despite her insistence throughout the play that she is a good and innocent helen who would never cause harm (or manipulate and seduce men into doing so on her behalf), helen stages a boatjacking by manipulating and seducing the king of egypt into giving her a vessel and then eggs on menelaus and his men to slaughter the egyptians on board. she even explicitly calls on "the glory of troy" to motivate them. anyway moments before this mini trojan war reprise breaks out in earnest, menelaus seizes his sword with another helōn.
1623: after learning about the slaughter at sea, theoclymenus laments that, if the ship he gave helen weren't so fast, he would have tried to capture [heilon] the fleeing greeks.
1670 ff.: the play ends with an implied helein pun delivered by castor and pollux as dei ex machina. they say that their sister is going to get home safe and be deified and, what's more, the island where hermes stopped for a rest when he abducted helen off to egypt is going to be named after her. as per my translation: "it will be called helen / among mortals forever, since it received you / when you were stolen from your home." there's no helein form here but i'd argue the pun is still registered through the sonic effect of the island/helen's name and the synonyms for haireō present in the close surrounding context, both forms of kleptō, to steal, which is associated with the abductions of various helens throughout the play. the island gets to be called that specifically because it's involved in an abduction that reaffirms that the protagonist helen (helen in egypt) was a metamythically viable helen the whole time.
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The Complete set of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome.
In 1893, Aubrey Beardsley was inspired to create and publish a single illustration based on Wilde’s play (the original is visually similar to what would later become The Climax, seen in this set as the final image before the tailpiece. Wilde loved the drawing, sent Beardsley a copy of the play containing the inscription "For Aubrey: for the only artist who, beside myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance", and soon commissioned him to illustrate the entire play. But unfortunately
the public was outraged when the English edition of the work was published with its illustrations and Wilde himself was taken aback when he laid eyes upon Beardsley’s completed drawings. Not only did he find their style inappropriate, but the illustrations had caused such public controversy with their fascinating, grotesque appeal that Wilde was concerned they would overshadow his work and “reduce the text to the role of ‘illustrating Aubrey’s illustrations’” (source).
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Why does Isis appear in the Orphic Hymns? The Greco-Roman career of an Egyptian goddess
Over the course of the past few months it became clear that Melinoe is the breakout star of the Orphic Hymns - doubtlessly mostly because of her unique status as Persephone’s daughter. However, she’s not the only deity largely exclusive to this collection with an unusual parentage. The forty-second of the hymns reveals that the mother of Mise was Isis. This was actually supposed to be a short article just about Mise at first. However, I figured that given how the reference to Isis is by far the most remarkable thing about the hymn (though not the only one by any means), it only makes sense to explain how she made it to Greece (and beyond) in the first place in more detail. How did Isis become a goddess of maritime travel? Why did she start to be portrayed riding on the back of a giant dog? How exaggerated the claims that she was the most direct competitor of early Christianity are? Why Herodotus’ assertion that she’s simply the Egyptian counterpart of Demeter ultimately explains very little? Answers to these questions - and more - await under the cut.
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The problem with like 90% of psychosexual horror is it's paradoxically written by some of the squarest people who've ever lived. People who write "and there was pornography and other sex things" as though that constitutes horror on its own.
AND THEN SHE TOOK OFF HER CLOTHES BUT IT TURNS OUT SHE WAS OLD AND GROSS!
er... ok?
There are a few Clives Barker out there in the world, but for every Clive Barker we have to contend with about a thousand Richards Matheson
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From the Sayings of Khakheperraseneb (18th Dynasty c.1400 BCE:
“Seni’s son Khakheperreseneb, called Ankhu. He says, `If only I had unknown utterances and extraordinary verses, in a new language that does not pass away, free from repetition, without a verse of worn-out speech spoken by the ancestors! I shall wring my body for what is in it, - a release of all my speech. For what is already said can only be repeated; what is said once has been said; this is no vain boast of the ancients’ speech that those who are later should find it good.’”
Inscribed on a writing tablet known as BM EA 5645.