because God had translated them: A Review of Dimitris Lyacos’ With the people from the bridge

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dimitris lyacos, greek poetry, poena damni, poetry in translations, shoestring press, shorsh sullivan, translated poetry

Translated by Shorsha Sullivan

Both postmodern and high modernist poetry have a context of traumatized grand narratives, reflections of human consciousness (both writer and reader) damaged by and aware of their own damages, whatever the source. In the highest sense, both approaches to writing use language to pull everyone involved up short to a face-to-face blinking contest with reality. For the real owns rider and horse, and language obscures this fact by its severing nature—and this explains why postmodern literature is such a difficult medium in most hands. Only a writer who has studied and read the deepest narratives will succeed, reaching for and pulling up out of the muck brief remnants that add much-needed weight to the radical fragmentation that is contemporary life’s relationship to personal and cultural histories, not to mention death and reality. This is the gift of high modern and postmodern art. In his trilogy Poena Damni Dimitris Lyacos proves it’s a gift we’re still (for now) willing to accept:

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, again. Comes
across an unknown work and sticks
in your mind. And where are the dwelling places of
the wicked. Ask those who pass beside you. Match, some smudges parts again
like those of the Testament,
then some of his pieces, then mine. The light so brief
that you don’t have time to write, in the dark you can’t
see if the page is blank. You write, a match, words fall-
ing on top of each other, another page, write, again a
match…. (Z213:EXIT)

Delicious, isn’t it?

Lyacos’ Poena Damni is powerful because the work is stitched in all its seams with a very deeply grounded lyrical and inward-looking precision. Most attempts at post (and post-post) modernism end up weak, scattered and afraid of scaffolding for fear of ridicule. In other words, something you only want to read once, with, at the end, a sense of relief that you are still someone special. Relief is overrated.

Begin getting to know Poena Damni as you read by searching references and collective human history and memory. You’ll get triggered for touchstones and allusions and be on your way to complete presence with the text. Soon, instead of knowing until you’re nauseous exactly where you stand (and do not stand) in today’s global economy, for example, you’re good and lost (in the best literary way) on the confusing road to a questionable salvation with each refugee, seeker and lost soul among the torturers, prisoners, survivors, lovers, friends and worshipers who haunt the trains, bridges, villages and churches that inhabit Lyacos’ (and our) world. It’s a real masterwork in that it accomplishes the avant-garde task of throwing the reader in all directions simultaneously. It’s a hearty meal, a marvelous, lively response to madness, to death and to reality, all of which we contain and run from constantly. In a sense, that would be the trilogy in a nutshell if the nut itself were not so remarkably complex.

With the people from the bridge is the second book in the Poena Damni trilogy, and in many ways the most initially difficult of the three books. It’s staged as a drama. NCTV is play’s title. There are four characters: the Narrator (who turns a cassette-player on and off and holds a Bible); a Chorus of women; LG, a man, and a woman named NCTV, presumably the subject of the drama’s title, who sits in the burnt-out shell of a car and also appears on television. The stage is set under the arch of a bridge. The floor is dirt, there are people and dogs sitting around, and the lighting consists of five or six lights, white, blue and green. There’s a fire in an oil drum. One of the men, half-naked to the waist, makes a cross out of two pieces of wood and sticks it into the mud. Thus, Lyacos builds a makeshift setting of a church for the reader.

The Narrator begins the scene by tearing out pages from the Bible and papering a nearby wall. Then he begins reading from Mark 5 (New International Version), a passage of the Bible in which Jesus restores a demon-possessed man. The man, too strong to be kept in chains, is free, possessed and wildly alone:

And always, night
and day in the tombs
and in the mountains he was crying
and cutting himself with stones.
But when he saw Jesus afar
off he ran
and worshipped him,
and cried with a loud voice,
and said ”what have I to do with you, Jesus,
son of the most high God?
I adjure thee by God,
that thou torment me not.
For he said unto him; come out thou
unclean spirit from the
man, and he asked him;
what is thy name? and he answered
saying; my name is legion
for we are many.

And so Lyacos begins the dramatic monologue of LG, a man possessed by demons, and not yet healed, waiting. And what does he hear? Her. And as the books nears its conclusion and LG draws near to being healed:

Narrator with the Bible.

for he saith; in a time accepted
I have heard thee and in the day
of salvation have I succored thee;
behold now is the accepted time
behold now is the day of salvation

Chorus. Burning newspapers. Narrator goes and turns on
the TV.

The TV. And NCTV is on the TV. It’s devastating, really, how accurately Lyacos explains our self-distances. And how beautifully, when it happens, we might be healed:

They were not to be found
because God had translated them

Has anyone else written a long dramatic poem about what goes on between the time a man and his insane legion encounter Jesus and the time they reach Him? Here we appreciate Lyacos’ gifted imagination.

Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni (the loss of the damned) is perplexing, confusing, disturbing and gorgeous. It’s timeless work. There isn’t a screwdriver or latte or economic travesty in sight. It’s so refreshing to read work that dives down into the deep inner life of human consciousness, and at the same time in allegorical slant, maps the outward, subjective mess of ordinary life.

As for the last sentence in With the people from the bridge, we are brought into our current condition in which a man, for reasons we can only guess at, has tried his best to become a God. Which of course, makes him possessed by a demon. ~

Dimitris Lyacos | Translated by Shorsha Sullivan | Available from Shoestring Press

Reviewed by Elizabeth Myhr

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Piotr Florczyk’s East & West

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calypso editions, east & west, lost horse press, monika zoebal, piotr florcyzk, Poetry

Piotr Florczyk

As a widely published translator and writer of essays and poems, Piotr Florczyk, a native of Kraków, Poland, persistently mediates between languages and countries. At the heart of his first full-length collection of poems East & West lies the disparity between a home country that is at once elegized, revisited, and left behind and the new country, in which “questions get answered with questions” and guest bedrooms represent “the emptiness of people / departing each year.” The space that opens up in the midst of these seemingly dissimilar worlds is to our surprise filled with much more than nostalgia for a lost home but inhabited by a forceful and precise lyrical voice of conscience. By not romanticizing the notion of leaving and instead suggesting a view of the Western landscape through the lens of a newcomer, Florczyk only reminds us that when “hoping / to open that door and enter the world,” we might just “find it the same / as the last time we left it once and for all.”

Florczyk aptly introduces readers to the East with the poem “Nineteen Eighty-Nine,” in which a mother welcomes back her dissident and escaped daughter. The poem sets the mood for the rest of the collection by meditating on changes—
in the person who has left as well as in the home that was left behind.
Florczyk writes, “We couldn’t wait to finally sieve, sort, and disembody the impurities in our garb” and cleverly evokes change in the shape of a Maytag washing machine, a symbol of the wealthy West and perhaps of a squeaky-clean new life.

And yet, change is more complex and more profound in the individuals who adjust to new lives. The line “Still, you stayed up late, calculating how far a heart travels from home with each beat” speaks to the idea that homes are perhaps never entirely left behind and that parts are always taken along on the journey.

In the same vein, water—the ocean and rivers—becomes a fierce accomplice, a reminder and a metaphor for leaving and wandering in Florczyk’s collection. In
“Downriver,” the ones that stayed behind become “the rust / racing down the tongue of the slide, / the seesaw weighing the air,” “making baby sounds / with [their] lips / pressed against the fishbowl”; while in the poem “Pastoral,” the speaker, who in a past life “rubbed shoulders with buildings, blue / trams and pigeons,” reminisces on the idea of leaving as an act that resembles “catch-and-releasing” by a brook or a miniscule “breadcrumb,” only to be faced with “silence, something / like a furrow or a dagger” in this version of a pastoral.

In contrast to this, Florczyk invites us to share experiences of returning home that are resonant with feelings of nostalgia, uncertainty, and speechlessness. In the poem “Tetris,” the speaker climbs a staircase in a building he once used to inhabit, which skillfully becomes a metaphor for delving further into one’s memories.

“The air was thick with flies,
the smell of fresh tar sizzling on the roof, where,

years ago, we’d go to spit on people’s heads and tweak
the antennas to catch somebody else’s dreams.

Life was beautiful, I thought, leaving the first floor.
I found my misspelled nickname carved into the wall.”

In the long poem “Kinderszenen,”—the title calls to mind Robert Schumann’s piano piece of the same title—this memory is intimately revisited through a series of places, ranging from Southern California and Cape Cod to Europe, the Tropics, and the speaker’s new and old home. Here too, water plays a significant role, namely that of a border to cross:

“My ship, the one I’ll take home,
is a walnut shell—its figurehead
a boy gasping for breath.”

The metaphor of the boy struggling to stay afloat is continued in the last scene, fittingly titled “Homecoming”:

“someone you love throws their arms
around your sweaty neck,
so that you can let go of the splintering oars
and wear your body like air.”

To “wear your body like air” gracefully recounts the otherwise difficult to describe sensation of returning to a childhood home after many years. The walnut shell boat and the splintering oars suggest the fragility of such a journey, the complications that might arise when we return to our homes.

The desire to look out over the water, to gaze beyond physical borders, and to have the world at our fingertips is not only addressed through the personal narrative of a speaker who has left home to find a different life, but also by means of a perceptive criticism of a society that is constantly on the lookout for new discoveries and ways to conquer the world.

In the longer poem “From the Life of Postage Stamps,” Florczyk employs witty metaphors to hold up a mirror to our antics of taking on the world by planes, by climbing towers, or by using computers, just to name a few. A weightlifter suddenly “has a future in Sudan, / carrying pails of water, / should anything here go awry” and “ghosts hook up inside / the royal chamber” while “the guests are reminded / America wasn’t built in an hour.” Florczyk’s facetious and assertive tone when writing “The planets are next” and “If you agree the future looks bleak, / don’t click here” remind us that our actions have consequences.

Reading Florczyk’s riveting collection, we find ourselves on a journey from the East to the West and vice versa, all the while being accompanied by Florczyk’s hauntingly beautiful lines that speak of the psychology of borders and exploration, as well as the reconciliation of old homes and new homes. In addition to sharing intimate narratives of moving and settling down, East & West presents us with the dilemma of the 21st century, where the “story of the sun / climbing a fire escape in the rain” is no longer worth telling, but instead quick discoveries are to be made since “Hitting the road—the desert / or the sea—has never / been easier, and that’s a fact.” As a translator of several books of Polish poetry, Florczyk pays attention to the smallest details and has perfected bringing down linguistic borders while also preserving cultural peculiarities. In East & West he allows his readers to step over the crumbling remnants of these borders, to gaze out over the landscape to both sides, and to our astonishment realize that there are no places left to hide.

Reviewed by Monika Zobel

 

 

 

Available from Lost Horse Press

Here We Go Again

 

It’s been a while since we’ve published new reviews, but we’re at it again, starting with a coming review of Dmitris Lycos’ With the people from the bridge, the third book in the Poena Damni trilogy which has been translated by Shorsha Sullivan from the Greek into English.

We are an international site and are happy to read potential reviews in English from anywhere on the globe. We prefer to see reviews of literature in translation, but if you have a wonderful book in English you believe deserves recognition, by all means submit.

Please send inquiries to bethmyhr@gmail.com. 

Hebrew Poetry Today: Carly Miller and Rachel Gellman Interview Eli Eliahu and translate his work

by Rachel Gellman and Carly Joy Miller

Eli Eliahu, born in 1969, is an Israeli poet based out of Ramat Gan. He has published two highly praised books in Hebrew: I, and not an Angel (2008) and City and Fears (2011). Aside from writing poetry, he writes for Haaretz Daily Newspaper on poetry and culture. Most of his work has not been translated into English, but following our interview with him below, you can read two of his poems, recently translated into English by contributing editors Rachel Gellman and Carly Joy Miller.

Rachel Gellman and Carly Joy Miller:  Other than poetry, what occupies your time?

Eli Eliahu:  I work at HaaretzDaily Newspaper as an editor and a writer on subjects of culture and literature. So every day I’m at the editorial board. I have a daughter, she is four years old, and I try to be with her as much as possible.

RG&CJM:  When did you start writing poetry and why?

EE:  I started to write poems when I was in elementary school. I was fascinated with books and words from the beginning and once I had the ability to write I tried to recapture the magic of the music created by words and syntax. But it took me a long time to feel that I had my private poetic language and that I could speak through it about my life and not just imitate other poets.

RG&CJM:  What are your obsessions and how do they come out in your writing?

EE:  I guess I’m obsessed with words. I like the rhythm, the order of the letters in the words. I am obsessed with the different meanings a word could have in different contexts. I also spend quite some time thinking about the connection between the soul and the body; I think it reflects in my poetry.

RG&CJM:  What tensions live in your poems? What wakes you up at night to start writing?

EE:  I think that art in general is based on and is about tensions. Everything that I write is about tensions between two or more things or feelings or thoughts, and poetry is the place that you can put some order to all these contradicting feelings. I also think that the main tension in poetry is between beauty and truth, between the aesthetic and honesty. But what makes me wake up at night to write is usually not an idea or a thought, but a combination of words that appears in my mind that demands to be developed.

RG&CJM:  How does living in Israel inform and shape your poetry?

EE:  This is a very complicated question. Almost as complicated as this country. One of the main shaping experiences of an Israeli man is the military service, especially to serve in the occupied territories. There are some poems of mine that deal directly with this experience.

But more than that, I think Israel is a very stressed, crowded, violent and noisy country. And this is the background of my poetry. I think part of my poetry is a documentation of the struggle of the individual against this background. I also live in a city, and the city with its buildings, roads, sidewalks, stairs, windows, is the background view of my poetry and a main source of metaphors and images.

RG&CJM:  Who are your poetic influences? Whose books do you read over and over?

EE:  First of all there is the Bible. This is the book I read over and over; it has great poetry in it. Maybe the best poetry written in Hebrew. And then there are many poets who have influenced me in different ways. Some of them influenced me with the subject of their poetry, some with their specific and unique vocabularies and others with the music of their poetry. To list some names – Amir Gilboa, Avot Yeshuron, Nathan Zach, Bialik, Alterman, Dalia Rabikovich, Itzhak Laor and others. I also read English poetry. I’m very fond of the poetry of Eliot, Yeats, Ted Hughes, Billy Collins, Carl Sandburg, and above all Walt Whitman. I also read translated poetry. We have great translators of Polish poetry in Israel. I like the poetry of Szymborska and Milosz. They had a great influence on my poetry.

RG&CJM:  What would you call your poetic aesthetic?

EE:  I think that poetry is the combination of beauty, wisdom, and music. I try to combine these in my poetry. I think a poet should not only pay attention to the meaning of the word, but also to its rhythm, music, to the associations it brings, and to its connections with the other words that it follows. Above all, poems must have inner music, even if the poem is not written in a structural way.

RG&CJM:  What do you love about the Hebrew language?

EE:  I love that Hebrew has an ancient background, and that there have been different kinds of Hebrew throughout the years. I like the fact that in Hebrew different words come from mutual roots. One gets a feeling that there is always a strong connection between things in the world. Hebrew also has an ability to say much in few words. The Bible does this in the most distinct way.

RG&CJM:  Do you translate any work into Hebrew?

EE:  Yes, sometimes. I am not consistent with it, but once in awhile I discover a poem that I like so much that I want to read it also in  Hebrew, so I translate first of all for myself. It must be a poem that I feel could also stand in Hebrew. There are poems that I like very much, but I feel that most of their power and beauty will be lost in translation. Up until now, I have translated Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and some poems by Billy Collins, Walt Whitman and Philip Larkin.

RG&CJM:  In the poems we’ve translated of yours, we’ve noticed the themes of family and your home life—do these subjects come up often in your work?

EE:  Yes. Since the beginning of my poetry I have been trying to find the right poetics in order to be able to talk about my life and my experiences, because, for me, this is one of the main differences between modern poetry/prose and philosophy. In philosophy, you begin with a big idea and then go to the individual, and in modern poetry you go from the individual experience to the big idea. I am also fascinated with the gap between the things that are on the surface and the things that lie beneath, between what is exposed and what is hidden. The place that this gap is most protrusive is within the family, because it is the most intimate place, and still, many things are happening under the surface.

***

Translations:

Yizkor

The day will come, and this war
will also be a chapter in the learning books.
Schoolchildren will memorize dates, names
of battles, warlords, states.
Some bored girl will draw hearts
in her notebook, a boy will yawn,
someone will ask to be excused.
Next to a black table,
a teacher will scold the student
who forgot the number
of casualties.

The Foreclosers

Knocked on the door at noon (a misunderstanding
with the city regarding property tax collections),
came with guns, pulled out forms,
so-and-so, square by square, they said.
So-and-so, debts accumulated, interest,
delays. They saw books on the shelves,
on the couch, on the table. The tall one asked
If I was working on a PhD. No, I said,
poet. He saw my book on the table,
opened it and read aloud: “The world is peeling back
like a giant snakeskin.” Beautiful, he said, the world
peeling back. Really beautiful. They agreed
to split the debt into equal payments. From all
the books, they foreclosed one line and went away.

Interview and translations by Rachel Gellman

and Carly Joy Miller