from Z213: EXIT

Dimitris Lyacos

                                                                                                     to here. Warmth, see people around talking again. You don’t care what about, only hear them talk. Petrol. Stove. I had missed it, warmth and wait for a drink. My turn, not yet. He talks looks at you as if you were with them. My turn. Not yet. Talks about some journey, a few days elsewhere, back again. Petrol, when you swallow you slightly feel it right up your throat. You swallow again. Speaks, changes the piece, speaks. Drink coming your way, you drink and listen to him look at him, long, grey, curly. Yellowred, and the grey colour outside looking more like blue. It brings you comfort, drinking, sitting in there, all together, including those across, all together around you. Still living here. Seven, nine, nine and you. And him coming in with the cake. Candles, her snuffing them, they laugh, she brings a piece for you too, the rails fresh from the rain, too late now for a train. You drink, it brings you comfort. One more. She smiles, touches your shoulder, a fleeting shudder, she asks if you are cold. You look at her mouth.  And when am I going to go away again. Toilet comes first. Stay there for a while. By yourself. River in time of peace. Dark moths like holes on the wall, who are they waiting for, who will be hiding inside them until dawn comes until they go home to sleep. Somewhere that no one can see them, deep inside the crack on the opposite wall, inch by inch growing over us here. And the curtains like winding sheets waiting. Outside the wind blows. Win dpro of. The rain is not going to stop. She called him to come. A crate of beer, coming. Take a bottle and drink the world forming inside it, that takes gradual shape while you keep drinking on, and yet, in the end, it is too heavy for you, you cannot keep it up any longer, you drop it and it shatters again. Drink, and then everything back again falling in place apart from this one, piece from the cake, left over odd piece doesn’t fit anywhere stays in your hand. Taste it. Wake with it. The rails parallel roots long narrow train gardens wet and the rigging runs parallel to their sky. Inside you something. Beneath the breath of sadness something as if. Inside me. Music that slowly. Lifting you up. I had forgotten how. A beam of light will fill your head and you’ll remember what’s been said. People, necks one leaning over the other waiting for what. Animals with the knife hanging over their head. That looks like you that looks like me. And those galleries in n ether darkness how did I come out. Tracking without traces of those searching for me of those I seek. One more. The voltage sags for a while the screen signal is lost, black and white, coloured, black and white, wave on the opposite wall. Of a storm. Without voice m ind ifthereis music that covers. The lights fail for a while, only a while, a piece covers, you drink, mutter je creuserai la terre jusqu’apres ma mort pour couvrir ton corps d’or et de lumiere to cover your body devenir l’ombre de ton ombre l’ombre de ton chien, rain, you drink again, rain. Send a raven to check if it has dried up somewhere. Prelude for what is awaiting you, their lips following on. Should music stop we would be suddenly heard. Chorus of stutterers. If she were to kiss me. Like the, for months I would watch him chiselling in the rock a face with a hammer. The rock that was his, the face that was hers. Striking. Like pleading. Striking on the face. Comes again, one more, on the house. Getting a little more blue outside, sat there, perhaps it might lay its eggs in that crevice. Her breasts behind my shoulder, cigarette, I still have some left. You think that, what if you kissed her, your stomach feels tight, the music that
                                        your chest feels tight your body asking for more. That I could be in love with almost everyone, I think that people are the greatest fun
and I will be
                       When did I last listen to it. Jester.
Just give me a chance to do my turn for you.  Lying together              

but in the grey of the morning
my mind becomes confused
between the dead and the sleeping

 
Morning, only with what’s left inside you and it’s yours.
Now it presses and needs to come out      


                             iss

translated from the Greek by Shorsha Sullivan

Read the original in Greek

Listen to the excerpt read in the original Greek by the poet:

Z213: Exit, the first part of Dimitris Lyacos’s Poena Damni trilogy, came out in Athens in 2009. The book, written in an almost telegraphic style, omits inessentials like articles and conjunctions, using a diary form: mainly colloquial, simple, with violations and distortions of grammar. The aim was to tell, in as direct and straightforward a way as possible, about a man escaping from some sort of confinement, and then trying to avoid being re-taken and brought back there. There are references forward to the other two parts of the trilogy, With the People from the Bridge and The First Death. The events he experiences are generally the everyday happenings of a contemporary Everyman—he must find food, shelter, sleep, sex, and so on; but there are also connections to the persecutions and pursuit of the Jews escaping from Egypt, the harassing and murder of Antigone, a constant and increasing sense of dread, an awareness of an all-powerful authority from which there is no ultimate escape. The language is deliberately plain, though in some places there are references, mostly to the Old Testament, and these tend to suffuse the contexts with more poetic tints. Although plain, the syntax is sometimes fractured, and the translation must try to follow this without demanding too much of the reader. One of the conceits of the text is to suppose that it is being composed by the narrator/protagonist on whatever paper he can find, in whatever light is available, and whatever intervals of rest he can allow himself in his flight. This results in lacunae and detached phrases which suggest to the reader fragmentary poems transmitted from antiquity, and also, perhaps, the harsh and interrupted breathing of a despairing fugitive. Reading this first part of the trilogy, it seemed to me to clamp the parts of the trilogy firmly together into a satisfying whole; I could easily see the escapee of Z213: Exit becoming the man in the cemetery in With the People from the Bridge, the disintegrating body on the island of The First Death.

Dimitris Lyacos is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy (Z213: EXIT, With the People from the Bridge, and The First Death). The work in its current form developed as a work-in-progress over the course of thirty years with subsequent editions and excerpts appearing in journals around the world, as well as in dialogue with a diverse range of sister projects it inspired—drama, contemporary dance, video art, sculpture installations, photography, opera, and contemporary music. So far translated into six major languages and performed worldwide, Poena Damni is the most widely reviewed Greek literary work of the past decades and Z213: EXIT one of the best-selling books of contemporary Greek poetry in English translation. Lyacos is an Honorary Fellow at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. A new edition of Z213: EXIT will appear this coming autumn.

Shorsha Sullivan was born in Dublin in 1932. He studied classics at Leeds and has spent most of his life in England where he has worked as a university instructor, archaeologist, and librarian. He has a special interest in Modern Greek theatre and poetry and was responsible for setting up the Modern Greek section at the Brixton Tate Library. Since 1996 he is working on Lyacos’s Poena Damni trilogy in close collaboration with the author.