Z213: EXIT is the first installment of the Poena Damni trilogy: a camp, a train, soldiers, a Bible with notes inside, encroaching darkness, the struggle to remember, the struggle of hiding, physical pain. As if waking up in a nightmare an escapee recounts his fleeting experiences in a series of fragmented diary entries in a hide-and-seek game with Death or even God. Written in a unique prose style, at times bordering on poetry and conveying a "pilgrimage of the soul" through a series of increasingly haunting pieces, Z213: EXIT creates the feeling that reader and narrator are led together through an eschatological experience. Horror is created by the scantiest vocabulary craftily combined to form a broken, unstructured syntax, seemingly tight, but leaving enough loopholes through which the reader's subconscious fears can pop in and out. Although evidently post-modernist, this is a book that does not undermine or shrink the traditional Grand Narrative themes; on the contrary, it thrives on them.
One of the most original and significant works to have come out of Europe in the new millenium is Dimitris Lyacos' trilogy, Poena Damni. Despite its short length, the text took over a period of thirty years to complete with the individual books revised and republished in different editions during this period and arranged around a cluster of concepts including the scapegoat, the quest, the return of the dead, redemption, physical suffering, mental illness. Lyacos's characters are always at a distance from society as such, fugitives, like the narrator of Z213: Exit, outcasts in a dystopian hinterland like the characters in With the People from the Bridge, or marooned, like the protagonist of The First Death whose struggle for survival unfolds on a desert-like island. Poena Damni has been construed as an "allegory of unhappiness" and compared to works of authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy.
--WILDERNESS HOUSE LITERARY REVIEW
While I have no idea of Sullivan's accuracy in translating this book, I do know that what I held when I read & read when I held Lyacos' Z213: EXIT, an astounding river of words poured from an open wound. There is coming & going & loss & redemption. There are sharp & tongue-filled rhythms. & the book itself denies its own categorization or existence by straddling poetry & fiction, story & memory, creating a dizziness in our blindness, a castration of reader grounding.
--BIG OTHER
The blocked prose poems fly in the face of the conservative conventions of poetry here in America because these poems go beyond the debate between the narrative and the lyric poem, often being both simultaneously.
--WRITE FROM WRONG
Dimitris Lyacos, With the People from the Bridge, Shoestring Press, 2016
Acclaimed by critics worldwide, With the People from the Bridge is a unique distillation of literary genres, an all-in-one densely layered poem, play, postmodern epic, a small-scale wide-scope apocalyptic tragedy. An immersive experience where voices issue from characters in a state of trance, drift crackling out of a TV set or a cassette player and the contours of reality begin to darkle and shift while trains still pass up overhead, audience members get up to leave, performers creep out through back-exits. This is the day and the place for the imminent return of the dead and the reader sees them approaching as he peeks through the gaps of Lyacos's elliptical storytelling.
Radical in its recasting of content and narrative form this is one of those rare books that unravel visions of wholeness and collective redemption within the darkest aspects of our folk and religious tradition. Perhaps the dead can rise again. Perhaps the world is ending only to begin afresh.
Dimitris Lyacos, The First Death, Trans. by Shorsha Sullivan, Shoestring Press, 2017
Despite being first in the publication history of the Poena Damni trilogy, Dimitris Lyacos's The First Death is the latest installment of the narrative sequence. A booklet found by the protagonist of Z213: EXIT during the course of his voyage, The First Death tells the story of a marooned man on a desert island - or has him tell it. In a sequence of fourteen sections the crippled protagonist struggles for his survival.Through an inexhaustible fecundity of imagery and a sense of unquenchable vitality in the midst of denial and despair a relentless fight develops between the character and the elements, as well as his physical and mental disintegration. Lyacos brings to bear a formidable culture in which fragments of ancient Greek are embedded in a supple modern idiom, and a variety of classical and biblical references are seamlessly integrated into the text. The violence and intensity of his vision combined with the headlong energy of his verse reveal a tragic inner landscape. The protagonist here could be a modern Philoctetes or an inverted version of Crusoe; but as the ordeal on the island comes to an end one is not finally sure whether one has encountered simply a wretched stump of humanity or, rather, a proudly self-mutilated god.
“After the first death,” Dylan Thomas wrote, “there is no other.” On closer examination, that turns into one of the most magnificently ambiguous sentences in English-language poetry—a textual trompe-l'œil that reverses its meaning depending on the angle of the viewer. From one perspective, it holds the promise of eternal life, yet from another it offers only a plunge into absolute nothingness.
Any connections between Dylan Thomas and Dimitris Lyacos are likely to come through serendipitous accident rather than design, but Lyacos’ The First Death (Shoestring Press, 2017, trans. by Shorsha Sullivan) also functions through a set of grand ambiguities—a marriage between hope and hell.
The First Death is the third installment in Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy, one of the major works of Greek literature in the last half-century. Like Beckett, Lyacos either succeeds or fails through the creation of a mood, rather than the creation of a narrative. This work belongs in that liminal zone between prose poetry and novella, ostensibly telling the story of a protagonist marooned on a desert island. As Shorsha Sullivan notes, Lyacos blends Modern Greek with “ancient words naturally assimilated into the flow of the text", proceeding through a succession of violent but unforgettable images, the moon “silent as pain” or the brain’s “bloodied rigging.” As the latest of his creations to be translated into English, The First Death is both disturbing and compelling. - Jacob Silkstone
One of the most original and significant texts to have come out of Europe in the past generation is Dimitris Lyacos’ poetic trilogy, Poena Damni. I call it “poetic” because there is no word that quite describes a work that moves alternately between poetry, prose, and drama, and that turns each like a prism in a quest for meaning that yields no final stability but only a “further horizon of pain” (The First Death, Section X).
As the above suggests, the text offers us a shifting series of scenes and perspectives, somewhere between a journey and a travail. There is an implicit narrative voice, but no narrative, that shifts abruptly from first to third person, a thread of consciousness that weaves in and out of dream and waking, fantasy and vision, confronting us at every turn with that which both forces and repels our sight. You know there is a narrative, because something in the voice compels you to continue; you simply do not know what is being told. You are simply within the framework of a temporality in its most radical sense.
Dimitris Lyacos was born in Athens in 1966, and studied law and philosophy. It was conceived back to front, with its “last” part, The First Death, written and published first, and the other segments proceeding backwards toward an origin that instates the original wound of the poem’s birth. Lyacos has revised it extensively over the course of some thirty years, retracting an earlier version of what is now With the People From the Bridge that was originally published as Nyctivoe and heavily revising the text called Z213: EXIT. The suggestion, I think, is clear: the poem remains open, a circularity that deflects all progression, an ourobouros that never meets its own tail.
How to begin, then, with a text of this nature? Perhaps we might start with the act of writing itself. Nearly midway through the revised text of the middle volume of the poem, Z213: EXIT, a prose section begins thusly:
Make a point of remembering to write as much as I can. As much as I remember. In order for me to remember. As I keep writing I go into it again. Afterwards it is as if it were not I. How do I know that I have written this. Faded, someone else’s words. My own handwriting though. From a void I wake up within, time after time. (Z213: EXIT, p. 61)
The voice of this section has no identity, most of all for itself. It begins in the fashion of a diary injunction to get something important down, indeed something crucially vital. No subject is specified, however, other than the act of remembering itself, of remembering in order to have memory. The writing must not stop, has no point at which it can safely stop, and yet its continuity as an act does not guarantee the writing subject. Repetition (“I go into it again”) is no foothold either, for as soon as there is a halt or a pause, everything is lost: “Afterwards it is as if it were not I.” The effacing hand is temporality itself, for no sooner does the pause introduce it then everything instantly ‘fades,’ and the words, even if still physically present, belong to someone else, an identity not one’s own. The speaker may even recognize his own handwriting, but only as a piece of external evidence suppositionally linked to but already alienated from himself. The attempt to create memory by marking time collapses upon itself, and, returned to a pre-maternal void in which the speaker wakes without birth to find himself in a “within,” he can only labor without issue, “time after time.”
The reader will recognize in this passage an echo of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, with its futile attempt to create a past by moving forward (“I can’t go on. I’ll go on”), and the temporal abrogation of Pozzo’s climactic speech in Waiting for Godot: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” We might not need to hear this again, especially expressed as inimitably as it was the first time; but Lyacos’ perspective is quite different. The real precursor of his poem is the Odyssey, by way of the New and Hebrew Testaments and such modern texts as George Seferis’ “The Argonauts.” Superficial resemblance notwithstanding, it is not as in much of Beckett a journey to the interior of the self, with or without a mirroring companion, but outwards toward a community of others.
We must, therefore, correct ourselves at the outset: if the problem of the self is identified with memory in the passage we have cited, Lyacos lays claim to the collective temporal dimension we inhabit as well, that of history. To put it in terms of the texts he appropriates for his vision, if the Odyssey is a circular journey that returns to its point of origin—the arc never quite completed in his own poem—the Bible, taken in both its books, is a long passage toward a transcendence that, always immanent, remains frustratingly out of reach. The condition this presents for the modern subject, with the burden of a situation that portends the end of the human story not as transcendence but annihilation, is the presiding subject of Poena Damni.
We might, then, seek another point of entry into the text (and many might be chosen, given its aspect of circularity). The first of the fourteen sections that comprise The First Death is a prose passage that describes a broken piece of human flotsam in a condition of ultimate extremity:
Sea of iron. Moon silent as pain in the depth of the mind. A body swept here and there on the rocks like seaweed or a lifeless tentacle, fruit of a womb ship-wrecked by the winds, ensanguined and flesh-filled mire. The left arm cut short, the right to the end of the forearm, a rotted stick raving amid the water’s lungs. Of the ravaged mouth there remained only a wound which closed slowly. From the eyes a blurred light. The eyes without lids. The legs down to the ankles—no feet. Spasms. (The First Death, p. 9)
The Odyssey is invoked here, the peril known to every sailor. It is not clear whether the broken body is alive or dead, or perhaps better said capable of death. It is moved as if “lifeless,” but also “raving,” shaken by spasms, and with a wound still ‘closing.’ Seemingly rejected by a “Sea of iron,” it also appears to drown in a watery lung under a moon whose silence suggests a pain too deeply embedded for expression. If in our first-quoted passage a balked narrator seeks an identity that continually eludes his grasp, in this one, it is a core of suffering that cannot relinquish itself. - Robert Zaller
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