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ETYMOLOGY // Supplied by an idiot tourist who / in the grip of a yearlong concussion / during which he had to learn to speak again / got it into that bruised brain / that a trek through the Carpathians might do the trick / forgetting the while the siren-call of ‘heights’ / the urge to leap / rising to crescendo / with each step up Gerlachovský štít / — formerly: Kösselberg [Cauldron Mountain]; / Kotol, [Cauldron]; / Franz Josef Spitze [after the King of Hungary and Emperor of Austria]; Szczyt Polski [Polish Peak]; / Štít legionárov [after the Czechoslovakian forces who volunteered for the Allies in WWI]; / and — harder to forget perhaps – Stalinov štít. //*
Báthory Erzsébet Hungarian
Alžbeta Bátoriová Slovak
Elizabeth Báthory English
EXTRACTS // Supplied by the same tourist / and prefacing a wildly ahistorical and unrepentantly anachronistic account / of the pleasures and persecutions / of she whom History accredits perhaps recklessly / as its most prolific murderess / but whom the account in question would have us reimagine / at least in part / as the victim of a hateful conspiracy / spearheaded by an obsessive incarnation / of György Thurzó / Palatine of Hungary and the true Vampyr of Oravský hrad / which would actually be more closely modelled on Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab / than on any real personage living dead or neither: //
The Countess takes her midnight bath / With blood that once gave life // — Venom, ‘Countess Bathory’ / from Black Metal (1982) // Woman of Dark Desires / Woman of Eternal Beauty // — Bathory, ‘Woman of Dark Desires’ / from Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1986) // Countess it is your night / You haunted by your wild desires / Possessed by bestial lust/ You are the goddess of the love / Oh how I love to feel your breath / I lust to be the lover of Death // — Tormentor, ‘Elisabeth Bathory’ / from Anno Domini (1988) // Shed your blood, Oh virgins pure / To feed the wrath of Satan’s whore / You’ve been chosen to let your blood / To make the mistress live for evermore // — Countess, ‘The Wrath of Satan’s Whore’ / from Ad Maiorem Sathanae Gloriam (1995) // The dark lady of her castle / Invented the secret of everlasting youth // — Barathrum, ‘Countess Erzsebet Nadasdy’ // from Saatana (1999) // Mistress of the gloomy nights / That made thy life / A cult to pain and pleasure / An apology to blood // — Murder Rape, ‘Mistress of the Gloomy Nights’, from Evil Shall Burn Inside Me Forever (2001) // Like a silent fog / The crimson blood flows into their veins / As mortal bodies are left for dead // — Funeral Fog, Transylvanian Bloodlust’ // from Under the Black Veil (2003) // Her breath is the creeping wind / her blood is the lake’s water / her hair is the falling leaves / her mind is everything // — Angmaer, ‘The Soul of Lizbeth’ from Sorg, Trolldom, Vinter (2014) //
* I was welcomed by the mountaineers / after unwrapping quite unthinkingly a candle / moulded like the inflated bust of / the above-named Comrade / and purchased from the gift shop at Terror háza / — the imposing Headquarters first of the Arrow Cross / then of the Hungarian Communist Party / and now an attraction for us tourists / queueing patiently to lay eyes on the site of old crimes / surely not our own. //
Oscar Mardell was born in London and raised in South Wales. He currently lives in an urban commune in Auckland, New Zealand, where he brews beer, teaches English, and plays the spoons. His work has appeared in War, Literature and the Arts, The Literary London Journal, 3:AM, and DIAGRAM.