Димитрис Лякос: Современный греческий писатель и автор трилогии Poena Damni

Greek writer and playwright (born 1966)

Dimitris Lyacos (Δημήτρης Λυάκος; born 19 October 1966) is a contemporary Greek writer. He is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy. Lyacos's work is characterised by its genre defying form and the avant garde combination of themes from literary tradition with elements from ritual, religion, philosophy and anthropology. The trilogy interchanges prose, drama and poetry in a fractured narrative that reflects some of the principal motifs of the Western Canon. Despite its length the overall text counts no more than two hundred and fifty pages the work 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, and has been acknowledged as an exponent of the postmodern sublime as well as one of the notable anti utopian works of the 21st century. Dimitris Lyacos is internationally considered as the best known contemporary Greek author and the country's most likely candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature and an entrant in Who’s Who, the database of the most prominent individuals across all fields of human activity. 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.

The trilogy would appear to belong to a context of tragic poetry and epic drama, albeit distinctly postmodern at the same time. It explores the deep structure of tragedy instead of its formal characteristics, having thus been called a post tragic work. Homer, Aeschylus and Dante 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 and Virginia Woolf 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. 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.

The work is hard to classify since it crosses the usual boundaries of genre. Z213: Exit re contextualizes elements from the greater Greek canon – including the escaped hero and the devote wanderer. It often takes narrative form, mixing poetry and prose. 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, 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 whereby the world depicted within the trilogy allows an open space for the reader to contribute his own internalized version.

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. in a fictional diary recording the experiences of an unnamed protagonist during a train journey into an unknown land. The man has been released or escaped from some time of confinement elliptically described in his journal and reminiscent of a hospital, prison, ghetto or enclave of some sort. His subsequent wanderings among desolate landscapes on the verge of reality are set in a closely detailed, and somehow Kafkaesque, atmosphere, underlining the point that the most dreamlike occurrences are also the realest. 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 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.

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. 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. 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. 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 and eschatology and the piece results in a joint contemplation of collective salvation which is ultimately left unresolved after a final narrative twist. physical and mental, as even the mechanisms of memory are dislocated. 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", the mechanical instincts of the cosmos rumble into action and sling this irreducible substance again into space prompting, perhaps, a future regeneration.

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." Chapter G from the book in English translation appeared in Mayday Magazine in March 2023 and chapter D in Image in March 2024.

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 (A Dissociated Locus 2018), Berfrois (Controlled Experience 2018), Gulf Coast (An Interview with Dimitris Lyacos 2018). and The Bitter Oleander (2016)

Poena Damni is, arguably, one of the most widely and best reviewed with its various editions having received 84 international reviews until summer 2023, and mentioned as "one of the most discussed and most lauded pieces of contemporary European literature". 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. 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 style and character. The trilogy has given rise to scholarly criticism and is also part of various university curricula on postmodern fiction, while Lyacos has been mentioned for the Nobel Prize in Literature.