Verse Wisconsin 106 | Review of Dimitris Lyacos

Two Book Reviews

Z213: Exit (Poena Damni) by Dimitris Lyacos (trans. by Shorsha Sullivan), Shoestring Press, (Nottingham, England), 2010. (Available on Amazon.)

Reviewed by Manos Georginis

According to Raman Selden we can no longer talk about the meaning of a text without considering the reader’s contribution to it. This is certainly true about Dimitris Lyacos’s poetry. Through its labyrinthine narratives and elliptical monologues the reader is invited to discover the meaning and the plan behind what, at first sight, may seem a meandering text. But the poet is reader-friendly enough to leave precious sign-posts so that we lose neither our way, nor our prerogative to impose a meaning upon the broad vista of this spectacular feat in existential poetry. POENA DAMNI (Pain of Loss) is a trilogy which traces, in a series of episodes of various poetic styles, the pain that the damned souls suffer in Hell when experiencing the loss of the vision of God. The three books that make up the trilogy, Z213:Exit (2010), Nyctivoe (2001), and The First Death (2000), published by Shoestring Press, were written in reverse order, as the publication dates of the English translations of the original Greek texts indicate.

Z213: Exit,the first installment and the latest to appear in print, recounts, in what reads like a personal journal in verse form or poetic prose, the wanderings of a man who escapes from a guarded building (prison or concentration camp) in a nightmarish, post-modernist version of a Dali-like landscape. We never learn the identity of the fugitive or that of his pursuers, nor the reasons why he was incarcerated in the first place, but the environment is reminiscent of a fascist state of both the black and the red variety. It is not delineated in realistic terms, but expressionistically, creating in the reader’s heart the necessary emotional angst, which permeates the whole trilogy. This is enhanced by the overriding waste-land setting, which could be (we are never told) the result of a war that has left the landscape in ruins. The general feeling is that we are going 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. This is language fluid enough to allow the reader to form his own interpretation:

And the others over the ruin expect
from you

                                    of the freedom which will be a burden to you, you
                                    would roam alone here and there with no one to
                                    nobody will come and seek
                                    the price                                                        of your
                                    wasted life
                                    -breath

The protagonist could be the medieval Everyman seeking God or salvation, or his modern version, the haunting and hunted, Kafka’s ‘K’. The first page, which normally gives the reader interpretative keys, describes a grim setting with prisoners round a central fire waiting for a guard with a list of names of the proscribed prisoners, who are taken out and thrown into deep pits. The protagonist, who, like Everyman is proscribed by Death, is tipped off by an unnamed second character and escapes through a skylight (from darkness into light):

And I as he had told me wore the cross and passed
by the side of the tower and came out on the road for
   the station. From there you could leave. If I could take
           a train from there. But I sat down then to recover for I
           was in pain.

That same Christ-like figure re-appears in the course of the protagonist’s wanderings, as a voice:

And I heard the groan and someone that, that told
me: walk. Walk in the midst of the sea, and I shall
save you and do not stop until you reach the other
side.

This is not religious poetry, but like all great poetry, it shares with Theology and Philosophy the same grand themes. Although evidently post-modernist, Lyacos’s poetry does not undermine or shrink the traditional Grand Narrative themes; on the contrary, it thrives on them.

Generically, Z213: Exit can be defined as a pastiche, but not in the post-modernist sense of Imitation, a tongue-in-cheek parody of the imitated texts. Instead, the poem enters into a fruitful dialogue with such seminal texts as The Bible, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Piers Plowman, The Waste Land, Kafka’s works, the list is inexhaustible. To borrow a musical term, this poetry is best described as contrapuntal, polyphonic music with very active and strongly differentiated parts.

The poem closes as open-endedly as it starts. The protagonist on the run, trying to escape

From an animal, armed, that is being followed,that is
seeking you out, get away by day, by night you sleep,
less, get away, get away, do not stop when you know
he is approaching, stand for a while, get away still until
you are tired, and once more, again, get away always,
but feel he is coming….

This is a hide-and-seek game with Death or even God, as it is not very clear whether the protagonist wants to be caught or to escape. The near-impasse had been hinted on in a passage that sits at the heart of the trilogy to mark the cyclical nature of the human predicament in which one’s end is also one’s beginning:

See the web, see how the passages of the maze,
all lead again to the same point which does not
exactly coincide with the exit.

Dimitris Lyacos may employ all the paraphernalia of post-modernist poetry: elliptical sentences, fragmented texts, incomplete words and a stream-of-consciousness narrative, but he always works to a plan, and it is up to the reader to discover it and enjoy what is definitely one of the most exciting post-modernist works.

One last word on the English text, which I have read alongside the original Greek work. Shorsha Sullivan must be congratulated on his exemplary translation, a firm, taut, accurate rendering, which does justice to this amazing work.

Manos Georginis is Associate Professor (English Language & Literature) at the Hellenic & Military University (Evelpidon School) in Athens,Greece. His English translations of Greek poetry have appeared in various literary journals. He is also the author of a fully annotated translation of the long poem Lambros (1828) by Greece’s national poet, Dionysios Solomos. His latest book, Writers at the Front Line: The Writings of the 1914-1918 War Poets, was published by the Hellenic Military& University in May 2011.

Home|Contents|Next

Z213: Exit (Poena Damni) by Dimitri Lyacos. Shoestring Press, 2010. (Available on Amazon.)

Reviewed by Judith Swann

So much of the context for this poem is not native to the average American poet that one worries it will not stand on its own as poetry. The cover notes tell us that scholars are studying it in Trieste, Amsterdam, and Oxford. It is a translation from the Greek, which is both literally true and a by-word for “I don't get it.” If you reject linear time, it is the third part of a work written over the past seventeen years. If you insist on linear time, it is the first part, despite it's being written last. Catalogers will construe Poena Damni as a series title, tagging the Z213: Exit to print just under the author's name on a printed catalog card (if anyone remembers those). The main entry will be Lyakos, Dimitris. Menis Lefoussis, to whom the book is dedicated, is not an access point. Readers will likely refer to the text not by its series title, but as (simply) Z213 just as they speak of The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso. The publisher provides readers with a brief promotional review: http://www.theadirondackreview.
com /book122.html.

Flipping through, one sees a fair amount of prose. Because there is no facing page Greek, we can't say if Shorsha Sullivan, translator, did a good job or not, but her text does read smoothly:

As long as a match stays alight. As much as you have time
to see in the room that flares and fizzles out. The images
holding briefly, then fall. Some lines you manage, they are
gone, another match, again. Pieces missing, empty pages,
match gone. And where are the dwelling places of
the wicked. Ask those who pass by beside you. Match

This is unmistakable poetry, consciously crafted poetry. Because the first couple of pages are blocks of left- and right-justified text, a case can be made that the lines are actually (long) verse constructs. At first, you see, no punctuation? Then, it starts appearing. So it's not an affectation: Lyakos will use it when he needs it. Each utterance is worthy our consideration, despite the shrouds. Typeface itself signifies:

from an animal, armed, that is being followed, that is
seeking you out, get away by day, by night you sleep,
less, get away, get away do not stop when you know
he is approaching, stand for awhile, get away still until
you are tired, and once more, again, get away always,
but feel he is coming, as time goes by he is approach-
ing, and still now that the distance increases, and now
that you draw away still the distance decreases, you

Note the voice of the poet/priest in the larger, sans-serif font, where as the voice of the damned appears in the book as Times Roman. Z213 is a tricky, rewarding, quintessentially post-modern work. On a down note, if the theme is μηδέν (le néant) I'm not sure the reader will acquire anything here that was not offered several decades ago by Marguerite Duras or Monique Wittig, except perhaps the Christianity. Yes, Z213 brings the twelve, the cross, and the lamb to the poetics of the abyss.

Still, the puzzles presented by Z213: Exit are engaging. Is 2:13 a time of day,like the 3:10 to Yuma? Is it an exit ramp off a highway, or a highway? How about the “Z” and the “X” – the end of the road? Is Z213 a cadaver's toe tag? Is it a star? A codex? It is the area of the Library of Congress classification system that is reserved for works about printers and printing establishments. Could that be germane?

Judy Swann lives in gorgeous Ithaca, NY in a small house painted in Frida Kahlo colors. Her poetry has appeared in Lilliput Review, Verse Wisconsin, Soundzine and other places both in print and online. She is an Iowan who often visited Wisconsin in her youth.