I would like to start a discussion on Dimitris Lyacos’s trilogy Poena Damni. Here is an excerpt available on the web:
Nobody is coming after me. Surely they have forgotten about me. Nobody will ever come here to find me. He will never be able to find me. Nobody ever. And they did not even know anything about it when I fled. They took no notice of me no one cared no one remembers. Now they will not remember when or how. Not even I. Tracks only, a hazy memory and those images when I look at what I have written, tracks of steps in the mud before it starts raining again. Uncertain images of the road and thoughts mumbled words, and if you read them without the names you won’t understand, it could have been anywhere, and then I spoke with no one and those who saw me no chance that they remember me. Every so often a face that seems familiar, from another time, someone looked at you, you recognised him, no, a part of another on a stranger’s face. Or the rhythm of the steps that sound behind you, the rhythm of your own steps, which occasionally you think follow you, they stop when you stop, or for a moment you think he is coming behind you, or you think that someone is breathing behind the door and will now come in. And then nothing, and then back again, and you suddenly turn your head as if you had heard him. But no one. You are far away, no one knows you, no one wants to find you, no one is looking for you. And tomorrow you will be elsewhere still farther away, still more difficult yet, even if they would send someone. They don’t know the way and before they learn you have decamped somewhere else. They know how to search but they don’t know what way. And even if they set off from somewhere they will still be quite far. And they will not be many. Perhaps just one. One is like all of them together. Same eyes that search, same mind that calculates the next move. Same legs that run same arms that spread wide. Ears that strain to listen, nostrils over their prey. Always acting like that. Two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two arms, two legs. The symmetry of the machine that pursues you. A net that thinks decides and moves ahead. The head a fishhook the body a line. All the same. Me too. One behind the other. Forward back further back, following the road. And if you don’t know you run ahead anyway, because someone is always coming behind you. Sooner or later he comes. And sometime there comes a hand that takes you by the shoulder or a worm that climbs up on your hand. It rolls on a pillow of saliva. Forward. And as it rolls it is growing and wrapping around you. A flat tongue on its saliva with two eyes that rise up and see you. Not you exactly, they look for a place to start from. Like him that, that night we were hungry, that had etched an open mouth on his stomach. Likewise this stomach has a mouth, it is a mouth about to open. From there you go somewhere else, on the inner road opening up, in the twists of the gut, there of course you are unconscious by now, unconscious you take the road back and when you wake they have brought you inside there again.
(http://www.thebluejewyorker.com/issue5/issue5pages/lyacos.html)
This is from Z213: EXIT, first part of the trilogy sequence. The book recounts the journey of an escapee in a series of fragmented diary entries. I would like to discuss the peculiar form of the book: prose stemming from poetry or the other way round. I think this one is a great examples of post-modern writing (or post-post-modern for that matter) and having read Seferis and Elytis as well as some of the contemporary greeks in translation I think this might be one of Greece’s best bets for a Nobel prize in the years to come. The book’s narrative, focusing on an inner and outer journey at the same time, develops in a series of haunting, labyrinthine pieces which seemed to me more and more real as I was going along - like hearing someone speaking to your ear. Anyway, I think this a must read – probably one of the most dense pieces of writing I have come across in the past years.
Nobody is coming after me. Surely they have forgotten about me. Nobody will ever come here to find me. He will never be able to find me. Nobody ever. And they did not even know anything about it when I fled. They took no notice of me no one cared no one remembers. Now they will not remember when or how. Not even I. Tracks only, a hazy memory and those images when I look at what I have written, tracks of steps in the mud before it starts raining again. Uncertain images of the road and thoughts mumbled words, and if you read them without the names you won’t understand, it could have been anywhere, and then I spoke with no one and those who saw me no chance that they remember me. Every so often a face that seems familiar, from another time, someone looked at you, you recognised him, no, a part of another on a stranger’s face. Or the rhythm of the steps that sound behind you, the rhythm of your own steps, which occasionally you think follow you, they stop when you stop, or for a moment you think he is coming behind you, or you think that someone is breathing behind the door and will now come in. And then nothing, and then back again, and you suddenly turn your head as if you had heard him. But no one. You are far away, no one knows you, no one wants to find you, no one is looking for you. And tomorrow you will be elsewhere still farther away, still more difficult yet, even if they would send someone. They don’t know the way and before they learn you have decamped somewhere else. They know how to search but they don’t know what way. And even if they set off from somewhere they will still be quite far. And they will not be many. Perhaps just one. One is like all of them together. Same eyes that search, same mind that calculates the next move. Same legs that run same arms that spread wide. Ears that strain to listen, nostrils over their prey. Always acting like that. Two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two arms, two legs. The symmetry of the machine that pursues you. A net that thinks decides and moves ahead. The head a fishhook the body a line. All the same. Me too. One behind the other. Forward back further back, following the road. And if you don’t know you run ahead anyway, because someone is always coming behind you. Sooner or later he comes. And sometime there comes a hand that takes you by the shoulder or a worm that climbs up on your hand. It rolls on a pillow of saliva. Forward. And as it rolls it is growing and wrapping around you. A flat tongue on its saliva with two eyes that rise up and see you. Not you exactly, they look for a place to start from. Like him that, that night we were hungry, that had etched an open mouth on his stomach. Likewise this stomach has a mouth, it is a mouth about to open. From there you go somewhere else, on the inner road opening up, in the twists of the gut, there of course you are unconscious by now, unconscious you take the road back and when you wake they have brought you inside there again.
(http://www.thebluejewyorker.com/issue5/issue5pages/lyacos.html)
This is from Z213: EXIT, first part of the trilogy sequence. The book recounts the journey of an escapee in a series of fragmented diary entries. I would like to discuss the peculiar form of the book: prose stemming from poetry or the other way round. I think this one is a great examples of post-modern writing (or post-post-modern for that matter) and having read Seferis and Elytis as well as some of the contemporary greeks in translation I think this might be one of Greece’s best bets for a Nobel prize in the years to come. The book’s narrative, focusing on an inner and outer journey at the same time, develops in a series of haunting, labyrinthine pieces which seemed to me more and more real as I was going along - like hearing someone speaking to your ear. Anyway, I think this a must read – probably one of the most dense pieces of writing I have come across in the past years.
