English translation of the blurb of the Italian edition of the trilogy by Il Saggiatore www.ilsaggiatore.com/libro/poena-damni

Z213: Exit

Z213: Exit, the first volume of the Poena Damni trilogy, confronts us with the purest idea of horror. Escaped from a prison, a hospital or a destroyed city, the protagonist, a Ulysses thrown into a cosmos without gods, crosses the rubble of a world violated by a catastrophic war. Arriving at a station, he buys a worn overcoat that belonged to a soldier, in whose pocket he finds a Bible studded with arcane annotations. From that moment on, he will decide to write a diary to tell of the journey that brought him there: the escape from a collective death; from an Apocalypse in which there is no hope of catharsis.

"Turn around and look at the shadow flickering behind you, stop and look at the past, once again cross those corridors where your eyes wandered, watchful ghosts, open the boxes, think about the other side of the wall. He looks at how all the corridors of the labyrinth always lead to the same point, which does not exactly coincide with the exit. "

With the People from the Bridge

With the People from the Bridge, the second volume of the Poena Damni trilogy, evokes a world in which death is a reversible experience. The protagonist's journey continues. The man arrives in a dark place, shrouded in half-light, dotted with human figures thrown into a street corner, stray dogs and degraded buildings; an environment that soon turns into a theatre scene, in which the drama of a man and his attempt to snatch the woman he loved from death is represented. Between the chasing of voices in the alleys and the white noise of a TV that does not work, reality is confused, marked only by the trains that continue to run on the elevated roads.

“Don't look behind. Go on. It is in front of you, it will come. Your day will also come, the door will open for you, you have arrived, they rise to embrace you, you have arrived, you, then another, and another, you will sit next to them, you will wait with them for the arrival of the others, no one will stay out, everyone will arrive, you will meet, no one will be missing, then it will be, then, now, for the first time, you will all be together. "

The First Death

The First Death, the third volume of the Poena Damni trilogy, gives voice to a hallucinatory delirium, which arises in the wake of tragedy. "The First Death" is the title of a little book, found by the protagonist during a train journey, of which we read the contents here: a man is missing on a desert island, and in the fourteen sections that make up the poem are his attempts to survive in a world shrouded in death. The deterioration seems to reach its peak, but something, a flash before darkness, takes the man away from his destiny, projecting him into space like a drifting particle, towards a place where perhaps he will be able to live again one day.

“The rustle lasts longer, but it's nothing, it's barely heard, it's already muffled in the walls. Nothing, absolutely nothing, just a cry. "

Translation by Viviana Sebastio

Dimitris Lyacos

Dimitris Lyacos (Born in Athens, 1966) is a writer, poet and playwright. The Poena Damni trilogy, started thirty years ago and conceived as an eternal work in progress, enriched by new additions and contributions from other media, including dance, painting, installations, sculpture, video art, contemporary music and theatre, has made him one of the most significant authors of our time.