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Dimitris Lyacos (Greek: Δημήτρης Λυάκος; born October 19, 1966) is a contemporary Greek poet and playwright.[1] He is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy. Lyacos's work is characterised by its genre-defying form[2] and the avant-garde[3] combination of themes from literary tradition with elements from ritual, religion, philosophy and anthropology.[4]

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Dimitris Lyacos
Born	(1966-10-19) October 19, 1966 (age 56) Athens, Greece
Occupation	Poet, playwright
Nationality	Greek/Italian
Period	Contemporary
Genre	Cross-genre
Literary movement	World Literature, postmodern literature
Notable works	Z213: Exit (2009)
Website
lyacos.net

The trilogy interchanges prose, drama and poetry in a fractured narrative that reflects some of the principal motifs of the Western Canon.[5][6][7] Despite its length - the overall text counts no more than two hundred pages - the work took over a period of thirty years to complete,[7][8][9] 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,[3] fugitives, like the narrator of Z213: Exit, outcasts in a dystopian hinterland like the characters in With the People from the Bridge,[10] 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" together with works of authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Thomas Pynchon[4][11] and has been acknowledged as an exponent of the postmodern sublime[12] as well as one of the notable anti-utopian works of the 21st century.[13][14]

Life

Lyacos was born and raised in Athens, where he studied law. From 1988 to 1991 he lived in Venice. In 1992 he moved to London. He studied philosophy at University College London[15] with analytical philosophers Ted Honderich and Tim Crane focusing on Epistemology and Metaphysics, Ancient Greek philosophy and Wittgenstein. In 2005 he moved to Berlin. He is currently based in Berlin and Athens.

Career

In 1992, Lyacos set about writing a trilogy under the collective name Poena Damni, referring to the hardest trial the condemned souls in Hell have to endure, i.e. the loss of the vision of God. The trilogy has developed gradually as a work in progress in the course of thirty years.[16] The third part (The First Death) appeared first in Greek (Ο πρώτος θάνατος) and was later translated into English, Spanish and German. The second part under the title "Nyctivoe" was initially published in 2001 in Greek and German, and came out in English in 2005. This work was substituted in 2014 by a new version under the title With the People from the Bridge.[17]

Various artists have brought Lyacos' work in different artistic media. Austrian artist Sylvie Proidl presented a series of paintings in 2002 in Vienna. In 2004, a sound and sculpture installation by sculptor Fritz Unegg and BBC producer Piers Burton-Page went on a European tour. In 2005 Austrian visual artist Gudrun Bielz presented a video-art work inspired by Nyctivoe. The Myia dance company performed a contemporary dance version of Nyctivoe in Greece from 2006 to 2009. A music/theatre version of Z213: Exit by Greek composers Maria Aloupi and Andreas Diktyopoulos, performed by Das Neue Ensemble and Greek actor Dimitris Lignadis was presented in 2013.[18] Two contemporary classical music compositions inspired by the trilogy, "Night and Day in the Tombs"and "The Un-nailing of our Childhood Years",[19] by The Asinine Goat were released in February and June 2022 respectively.[20] Dimitris Lyacos was Guest International Poet with Les Murray in 1998 Poetryfest International Poetry Festival, Aberystwyth, Wales. Henceforth he has conducted readings and has lectured on his work at various universities worldwide, including Oxford, Trieste, Hong Kong and Nottingham. In 2012 he was Writer in Residence at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa.[21] He is one of the most recent Greek authors to have achieved international recognition,[22][23][24] Poena Damni being the most widely reviewed Greek literary work of the recent decades[25] and Z213: Exit, arguably, the best-selling book of contemporary Greek poetry in English translation.[8][26] Lyacos was guest author at the International Literature Festival of Tbilisi in 2017[27] In 2018 he represented Greece in the Transpoesie Festival, Brussels.[28] He was guest author at the 2020 International Literary Festival of Prishtina[29] and at the 2022 Bucharest International Poetry Festival.[30] Until autumn 2022 Lyacos's work was translated in 21 languages[31][29] with the full trilogy having appeared in 7 languages, being thus the most extensively translated work of contemporary Greek Literature in the new millenium.

Poena Damni

Summary/Context

The trilogy would appear to belong to a context of tragic poetry and epic drama, albeit distinctly postmodern[32][33] at the same time. It explores the deep structure of tragedy instead of its formal characteristics, having thus been called a post-tragic work.[34] Homer, Aeschylus[35] and Dante[36][33] as well as the darker aspects of romantic poetry together with symbolism, expressionism,[37] and an intense religious and philosophical interest permeate the work. Poena Damni has thus been related, despite its postmodern traits, more to the High Modernist tradition of James Joyce[38] and Virginia Woolf[39] The first of the three pieces, Z213: Exit (Z213: ΕΞΟΔΟΣ), accounts a man's escape from a guarded city and his journey through dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, lands.[40] In the second book, With the People from the Bridge (Με Τους Ανθρώπους Από Τη Γέφυρα) the protagonist of Z213: Exit becomes a first-degree Narrator appearing as one spectator in a makeshift play performed under the arches of a derelict train station. The third book, The First Death (Ο Πρώτος Θάνατος) opens with a marooned man on a rocky island and details his struggle for survival as well as the disintegration of his body and the unrolling of its memory banks.[41]

Survey

The work is hard to classify since it crosses the usual boundaries of genre.[33][42] Z213: Exit re-contextualizes elements from the greater Greek canon — including the escaped hero and the devote wanderer.[43][44] It often takes narrative form, mixing poetry and prose.[45] The trilogy moves into dramatic representation of character and situation in With the People from the Bridge, and subsequently to a hard lyrical kind of poetry used to depict the break-up and eventual apotheosis of the body in The First Death. The possibilities of divergence between the perceived and the objective outside world are exploited; the reader follows the irregular flow of internal monologues stemming from events in the external world but ultimately viewed as reflected onto the thinking and feeling surfaces of the protagonist's mind. On the other hand, an alien setting and the unfolding, dreamlike occurrences are presented with impressive solidity,[46] pointing to an alternative reality, or, unveiling a hidden dimension of the world. From that perspective, the work has been interpreted as a kind of surfiction[47] whereby the world depicted within the trilogy allows an open space for the reader to contribute his own internalized version.[48]

Z213: EXIT

Z213: Exit uses the device of the palimpsest to present a fictional tissue combining elements of both ancient and modern sources as well as the "dialogue" of its two protagonists.[44] It is composed of a series of fragmented entries[49][50] in a fictional diary recording the experiences of an unnamed protagonist during a train journey into an unknown land.[51] The man has been released - or escaped - from some time of confinement elliptically described in his journal[52] and reminiscent of a hospital, prison, ghetto or enclave of some sort.[53] His subsequent wanderings among desolate landscapes on the verge of reality[54] are set in a closely detailed, and somehow Kafkaesque,[55] atmosphere, underlining the point that the most dreamlike occurrences are also the realest.[46][56] Along the way, the protagonist delves deeper in what seems like a quasi-religious quest while, at the same time, his growing impression of being stalked[57] introduces an element of suspense and a film noir-like quality. Thus, the text hinges on the metaphysical but is also reminiscent of an L.A. private eye in a 1940s detective novel closing upon an extraordinary discovery. Z213: Exit ends with a description of a sacrifice where the protagonist and a "hungry band feasting" roast a lamb on a spit, cutting and skinning its still bleating body and removing its entrails as if observing a sacred rite.[58][59]

With the People from the Bridge

With the People from the Bridge is fragmentary, hallucinatory, at once firmly rooted in a complex webwork of allusions and drifting free of referentiality, evading attempts to pin it down.[60] The plot hinges on the story of a character resembling the Gerasene demoniac from St. Mark's gospel, living in a cemetery, tormented by demons, and cutting himself with stones. He enters the tomb of his dead lover attempting to open the coffin in which she seems to lie in a state not affected by decomposition and the urgency of his desire reanimates her body whose passage back to life is described.[17] The grave becomes a "fine and private place" for lovers still capable of embracing.[61]

The story recounts a multiperspectival narrative based on the theme of the revenant through the first-person embedded accounts of four characters: a man possessed by demons attempts to resurrect the body of his lover but ends in joining her in the grave.[62] The action is enveloped in a context reminiscent of a festival for the dead as well as that of a vampire epidemic. There are clear references to Christian tradition[63] and eschatology and the piece results in a joint contemplation of collective salvation which is ultimately left unresolved after a final narrative twist.[25]

The First Death

In The First Death a place is denied to the mutilated body which grinds against the rocks and suffers continuing degradation,[64] physical and mental, as even the mechanisms of memory are dislocated.[65] Yet the bond between person and body that ensures life still persists, and, "at that point without substance/ where the world collides and takes off",[66] the mechanical instincts of the cosmos rumble into action and sling this irreducible substance again into space - prompting, perhaps, a future regeneration.

From trilogy to tetralogy: Until the Victim Becomes our Own

In an interview with Lyacos for 3:AM Magazine, translator Andrew Barrett announced that he is in the process of translating the author's new work-in-project, titled Until the Victim Becomes our Own, which is conceived as the "zeroth" book that will convert Poena Damni into a tetralogy. According to Barrett, the new book explores bloodshed as the building-block in the formation of society and the eventual place of the individual in a world "permeated by institutionalized violence."[67]

The interviews

Lyacos's literary output is complemented by a series of interviews that aim to function as a conceptual companion to his work and, at the same time, informally expand on a variety of literature-related subjects as well as philosophy, religion, cinema and the arts. These interviews have appeared on an annual basis in outlets including World Literature Today (A World to Be Repaired - 2021), 3:AM Magazine (Entangled Narratives and Dionysian Frenzy - 2020), Los Angeles Review of Books (Neighboring Yet Alien - 2019), BOMB (magazine) (A Dissociated Locus - 2018), Berfrois (Controlled Experience - 2018), Gulf Coast (magazine) (An Interview with Dimitris Lyacos - 2018).[68] and The Bitter Oleander (2016)[69]

Critical reception

Poena Damni is, arguably, one of the most widely and best reviewed[6][51] work of contemporary Greek literature in translation[70] with its various editions having received 70 international reviews until spring 2021,[71][72] and mentioned as "one of the most-discussed and most-lauded pieces of contemporary European literature".[6][73] It has been noted for creatively surpassing the distinction between modernism and postmodernism while, at the same time, being founded on a large variety of canonical texts of Western Literature.[74][75] Most critics comment on the use of an intricate network of textual references and paraphrases of classical and biblical works, in tandem with the work's unconventional[76] style and character.[33] On a different note, one critic, pointed out that "despite it being beautifully written and heart-wrenching, the gruesome detail of some passages filled [her] with a sense of dread at the turning of every page" and issued a content warning for readers.[50] In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Poena Damni has attracted attention as "a vertiginous work that is at once archetypal, transcendent, and uniquely suited to this particular moment in time".[77][78] The trilogy has given rise to scholarly criticism and is also part of various university curricula on postmodern fiction,[79][6][80] while Lyacos has been mentioned for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[81][29][82][83][67][84][85] [86]

Further reading

Selected criticism

• An essay by Garrett Phelps, exploring Lyacos's postmodern affinities in Asymptote Journal
• A 6000 words essay by Robert Zaller, analyzing Lyacos's trilogy in the Journal of Poetics Research
• Poena Damni, A Review Essay by Toti O'Brien. Ragazine Magazine, May 2019, Los Angeles. https://www.ragazine.cc/poena-damni-poetry-review.
• A special feature on Dimitris Lyacos's trilogy on the Bitter Oleander Magazine[87] including extensive excerpts and a long interview with the author
• Overview of the Poena Damni trilogy in Cleaver Magazine

Selected interviews

• A World to Be Repaired: A Conversation with Dimitris Lyacos World Literature Today, October 2021, Oklahoma, USA.
• Entangled Narratives and Dionysian Frenzy: An interview with Dimitris Lyacos. 3:AM Magazine, September 2020, UK.
• Neighboring Yet Alien: An interview with Dimitris Lyacos. Los Angeles Review of Books, September 2019, Los Angeles, USA.
• A Dissociated Locus: Dimitris Lyacos Interviewed by Andrew Barrett. BOMB (magazine), November 2018, New York, USA.
• Callie Michail interviews Dimitris Lyacos in Berfrois, November 2018, London, UK.
• John Taylor interviews Dimitris Lyacos. Gulf Coast (magazine), Issue 30.1, Winter/Spring 2018, Houston USA, (pp. 277–286)[88]
• An interview with the author in The Writing Disorder Magazine
• John Taylor interviews Dimitris Lyacos. New Walk, Issue 12, Spring/Summer 2016, Leicester UK.

Bibliography

• Poena Damni O Protos Thanatos. Odos Panos. Athens. 1996. ISBN 960-7165-98-5
• Poena Damni The First Death. English edition. Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press. 2000. ISBN 1-899549-42-0
• Poena Damni Nyctivoe. Greek - German edition. Translated by Nina-Maria Jaklitsch. CTL Presse. Hamburg. 2001.[89]
• Poena Damni Nyctivoe. English edition. Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press. 2005. ISBN 1-904886-11-6
• Poena Damni Z213: ΕΞΟΔΟΣ. Greek Edition. Dardanos Publishers, Athens 2009. ISBN 960-402-356-X
• Poena Damni Z213: Exit. English edition. Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press 2010. ISBN 978-1-907356-05-6
• Poena Damni Der erste Tod. German edition. Translated by Nina-Maria Wanek. Verlagshaus J. Frank. First edition 2008. Second edition 2014. ISBN 978-3-940249-85-2
• Poena Damni With the People from the Bridge. Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press, Nottingham 2014. ISBN 978 1 910323 15 1
• Poena Damni Z213: Exit, Second Edition (Revised). Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press, Nottingham 2016. ISBN 9781910323625
• Poena Damni The First Death, Second Edition (Revised). Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press, Nottingham 2017. ISBN 9781910323878
• Poena Damni Z213: Exit, French Edition. Translated by Michel Volkovitch. Le Miel des Anges, 2017. ISBN 9791093103235
• Poena Damni With the People from the Bridge, Second Edition (Revised). Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press, Nottingham 2018. ISBN 9781910323915
• POENA DAMNI: THE TRILOGY. 3-Book Box Set Edition (English). Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press, Nottingham 2018. ISBN 9781912524013
• POENA DAMNI - German Edition. Translated by Nina-Maria Wanek. KLAK Verlag, Berlin 2020.
• POENA DAMNI - Italian Edition. Translated by Viviana Sebastio. Il Saggiatore, Milan 2022.
• POENA DAMNI - Portuguese/Brazilian Edition. Translated by Jose Luis Costa. Relicario Edicoes, Belo Horizonte, 2022.
• POENA DAMNI - Turkish Edition. Translated by Arzu Eker. Can, Istanbul, 2022.

References

External links

• Official website
• Sullivan, Shorsha. "Results for 'lyacos'". Worldcat.org. Retrieved 2013-07-27.
• A video reading with the author (Greek subtitled in English) on YouTube

На других языках

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- [en] Dimitris Lyacos

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[es] Dimitris Lyacos

Dimitris Lyacos (en griego, Δημήτρης Λυάκος; nacido el 19 de octubre de 1966) es un poeta y dramaturgo griego contemporáneo[1] Es el autor de la trilogía Poena Damni. Reconocida por su estilo desafiante y la combinación de elementos vanguardistas de temáticas procedentes de la tradición literaria con elementos del rito, religión, filosofía y antropología, la obra de Lyacos examina de nuevo la gran narrativa en el contexto de algunos de los princípios fundamentales del Canon Occidental. Poena Damni fue escrito a la largo de un período de treinta años[2][3] y durante este tiempo cada libro fue revisado y publicado en diferentes ediciones y estructurado según un grupo de conceptos como el del chivo expiatorio, la búsqueda, el regreso de los muertos, la redención, el sufrimiento físico y la enfermedad mental. Los personajes de Lyacos se encuentran a una cierta distancia de la sociedad[4] como si fueran fugitivos, como el narrador en Z213: Exit, marginados en una tierra distópica como los personajes de Con los Hombres desde el Puente, o abandonado como el protagonista de La Primera Muerte cuya lucha para sobrevivir se desarrolla en una isla desierta. En general, la trilogía ha sido interpretada como una “alegoría de la desdicha” junto a obras de autores como Gabriel García Márquez y Thomas Pynchon.[5]

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[fr] Dimitris Lyacos

Dimitris Lyacos (Δημήτρης Λυάκος) est un poète et un dramaturge grec contemporain[1]. Il est l'auteur de la trilogie Poena Damni. Reconnue pour sa forme de croisement entre genres et la combinaison avant-gardiste de thèmes de la tradition littéraire avec des éléments du rituel, de la religion, de la philosophie et de l'anthropologie, l'œuvre de Lyacos réexamine de grands récits dans le contexte de certains des motifs durables du Canon occidental. Poena Damni a été écrit dans une période de trente ans[2],[3], avec les livres individuels révisés et republiés dans différentes éditions et arrangés autour d'un ensemble de concepts comprenant le bouc émissaire, la quête, le retour des morts, le salut religieux, la souffrance physique, la maladie mentale. Les personnages de Lyacos sont toujours à distance de la société en tant que telle[3], fugitifs, comme le narrateur de Z213 : Exit, parias dans un arrière-pays dystopique (comme les personnages dans Avec les gens du pont), ou coincés, comme le protagoniste de La première mort dont la lutte pour survivre se déroule sur une île déserte. Dans l'ensemble, la trilogie a été interprétée comme une «allégorie du malheur» et comparé aux œuvres d'auteurs comme Gabriel Garcia Marquez et Thomas Pynchon[4] tout en étant considérée, en même temps, comme l'un des principaux exposants du sublime postmoderne.

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[ru] Лиакос, Димитрис

Димитрис Лиакос (греч. Δημήτρης Λυάκος; род. 19 октября 1966, Афины) — современный греческий поэт и драматург[1], получивший известность как автор трилогии «Poena Damni». Известная своей жанровой формой и авангардным сочетанием тем из литературной традиции с элементами обрядности, религии, философии и антропологии[2], работа Лиакоса заставляет по-новому взглянуть на произведения мировой литературы сквозь призму устойчивых мотивов западной литературной традиции[3][4]. Несмотря на размер произведения — общий объем трилогии составляет не более двухсот страниц — Лиакосу потребовалось тридцать лет, чтобы закончить работу над отдельными частями трилогии[4][5][6]. За это время книги переиздавались в различных издательствах. Основные темы трилогии – поиск и скитание, возвращение мёртвых, искупление, физическое страдание и душевные терзания. Герои Лиакоса всегда находятся как бы вне общества[7]: это беглецы, как, например, рассказчик «Z213: Выход», изгнанники в отдалённой глубинке, как персонажи «Люди с моста», или мародёры, как главный герой «Первой Смерти», борющийся за выживание на необитаемом острове. «Poena Damni» интерпретируется как «аллегория несчастья» наряду с работами таких авторов, как Габриэль Гарсиа Маркес и Томас Пинчон[2][8]. Но в то же время это один главных образчиков вершины литературы постмодернизма[9] и одно из важнейших антиутопических произведений XXI века[10].

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