Home | Books By Year | Books from 2000
The First Death
Buy The First Death now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the book. And once you've experienced the book, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'The First Death' is a book by Dimitris Lyacos. It is part of the 'Poena Damni' trilogy. The book tells the story of a marooned man on a desert island in a sequence of fourteen poem-sections, recounting his relentless struggle for survival as well as his physical and mental disintegration. The work alludes simultaneously to a modern Philoctetes, an inverted version of Crusoe as well as the myth of dismemberment of Dionysus. The dense and nightmarish imagery of the poem, replete with sensations of hallucination, delirium, synesthesia and putrefaction have drawn comparisons to Lautreamont, Trakl and Beckett.Jena Woodhouse, Lyacos: A "feast of all fruits"International Herald Tribune/Kathimerini English Edition, 4 May 2000The Journal of Modern Greek Studies,Volume 19, 2001/ Johns Hopkins University Press. Robert Zaller - Recent Translations from Shoestring Press. Tassos Denegris, Dimitris Lyacos, Dionysios Solomos. Despite being first in the publication history of the Poena Damni trilogy, 'The First Death' is chronologically last in the narrative sequence.Fran Mason, Historical Dictionary of postmodern Literature and Theater, Dimitris Lyacos pp. 276-77. Second Edition, Rowman and Littlefield 2016.
Title
The title of the book refers to the contradistiction between 'first' and second death in the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine,Flucht als Heiligenpassion. Review by
Peter Oehle. Fixpoetry, July 2020.https://www.fixpoetry.com/feuilleton/kritik/dimitris-lyacos/poena-damni-lyrik-trilogie the 'first death' referring to the natural end of life (death of the body) as opposed to the second death (annihilation, death of the soul).Revelation, 2:11, 20:6, 20:14 and 21:8. Insofar as the 'first death' is not of a spiritual kind it is not considered as "real death", that is to say, annihilation. In such spiritual sense, the protagonist of the book subsists in a "hellish" kind of existence, presumably awaiting the occurrence of future redemption or definitive extinction. The title also refers to the occurrence of 'the' first death in the context of the biblical history of the human race, namely the murder of Abel by his brother Cain.
Synopsis
'The First Death' recounts the ordeal of a 40 year old male named adam stranded on a desert-like island. The book starts with a description of his mutilated body which grinds against the rocks. The poem expands on the theme of his continuing degradation,Tony Malone, Poena Damni - The First Death by Dimitris Lyacos.
Tony's Reading List, Melbourne, September 2019. https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2019/09/19/poena-damni-the-first-death-by-dimitris-lyacos-review/ physical and mental, as even the mechanisms of memory are dislocated. Yet, the bond between person and body ensures life still persists, and, "at that point without substance/ where the world collides and takes off",The First Death, Poena Damni, Translated by Shorsha Sullivan, Shoestring Press, Nottingham 2000, page 32. the mechanical instincts of the cosmos rumble into action and sling this irreducible substance again into space - prompting, perhaps, a future regeneration.
Themes
'The First Death', recounts the result of its protagonist's voyaging towards annihilation. His body and mind are on the verge of dissolution while fighting for continuance and survival. Portrayed as a victim of nature and presumably expelled by society, he is represented both as a castaway and an abortion, dying before he has ever achieved birth. The work describes his purgatorial-like torture, mapping a desert and rocky island as the locus of his suffering. His exclusion and solitude allude to Greek Tragedy, most importantly Philoctetes, while images of mutilation and dismemberment relate to ancient Greek sacrifices and rituals. The myth of the dismemberment of Dionysus by the Titans is also hinted at as the text resorts to the concept of sparagmos (,Section XII, line 7. Dimitris Lyacos. The First Death. First Edition, Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press, Nottingham 2000 from 'sparasso', "tear, rend, pull to pieces"), an act of rending, tearing apart, or mangling,Bruce Lincoln, 'Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice' (University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 186. Other oblique classical references are equally embedded in the text, such as the presence of Orpheus, also suggested by images of dismemberment. In its role of epilogue of the Poena Damni trilogy the poem also witnesses the aftermath of the impending violence of the first volume, Z213: Exit.
Style
The original Greek employs an unconventional modern idiom, accommodating a variety of ancient Greek words and integrating them into the flow of the text. Contrary to the previous book of the trilogy, With the People from the Bridge, which makes use of predominantly bare, simple sentences in a theatrical context, 'The First Death' is written in a dense, highly tropical style. Each poem-section unravels a multi-layered concatenation of images in order to illustrate the unremitting torment of the book's protagonist. Often, the weightiness of surreal abstraction lends a metaphysical atmosphere to the work, thus investing the ordeal undergone by the protagonist with a sublime-like quality as, he, in spite of the world, continues his struggle to the limits of his powers. Images of spoiled, rotten, maimed nature, artifacts, architecture and especially bodies are described in such rich detail they take on an eerie, atrocious, paradoxical glory.Poena Damni, A Review Essay by Toti O'Brien. Ragazine Magazine, May 2019, Los Angeles. https://www.ragazine.cc/poena-damni-poetry-review/ The book brings to bear aspects of the Homeric clarity of description which are in their turn coupled with fierce and expressionistic depictions of a nightmarish setting.A Review of the Trilogy by Talia Franks. Word for Sense, July 2020, Boston USA. https://word-for-sense.com/2020/07/10/book-review-poena-damni-trilogy-dimitris-lyacos-translation-shorsha-sullivan/ In its aligning disparate literary traditions in order to intensely depict the clash of the human subject in the midst of a hostile world, 'The First Death', is considered as one of the most violent works of Greek literature in modern times.Robert Zaller - Recent Translations from Shoestring Press.The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 19, 2001/ Johns Hopkins University Press.Bruno Rosada, The First Death. Characteristics of Dimitris Lyacos' poetry. Shoestring Press 2000.
Critical reception and publication history
Being the first to have been published among the three installments of the Poena Damni trilogy The First Death has received a number of reviews that span over two decades. Some critics underline the work's close connection with Ancient Greek Literature due to its hybrid linguistic character and its allusions to Tragedy" while others see a strong connection with current events. Critic Toti O' Brien notes: "As I read The First Death, I imagine the carpet of corpses lining the Mediterranean. Strata and strata of limbsnow bonespiled up during recent decades, all belonging to shiploads of migrants seeking escape through Europe. I cant help connecting the poetry under my eyes with this precise scenery. The most powerful, the most disturbing imagery Lyacos paints makes sense in this context where it naturally embeds itself."
The book was originally published in Greek in 1996 and has been translated in English, German, Spanish and Italian. The first English edition appeared in 2000 and went out of print in 2005. A second revised English edition was launched as an e-book in spring 2017 and subsequently appeared in print in the autumn of the same year .http://www.shoestring-press.com/2017/10/the-first-death/ The new edition contains extended Translator's Notes explaining the Ancient Greek references of the original Greek text.Dimitris Lyacos, The First Death (Poena Damni vol. 3). Second Revised Edition. Translated by Shorsha Sullivan. Shoestring Press, Nottingham 2017.
Further reading
*[http://poeticsresearch.com/article/a-column-of-cloud-and-a-column-of-fire-dimitris-lyacos-poena-damni-by-robert-zaller/ A 6000 words essay by Robert Zaller, analyzing Lyacos's trilogy in the Journal of Poetics Research]
* A special feature on Dimitris Lyacos's trilogy on the Bitter Oleander Magazine including extensive excerpts and an interview with the author
*John Taylor interviews Dimitris Lyacos. Gulf Coast (magazine), Issue 30.1, Winter/Spring 2018, Houston USA, (pp. 277286)
*[http://www.cleavermagazine.com/poena-damni-trilogy-by-dimitris-lyacos-reviewed-by-justin-goodman/ Overview of the Poena Damni trilogy in Cleaver Magazine]
References
Category:Postmodern novels
Category:2000 novels
Category:Classical mythology in popular culture
Category:Greek novels
Buy The First Death now from Amazon
<-- Return to books from 2000