This doubt doesn’t prevent Sullivan from providing clarity for the narratives themselves. It does make one wonder what can be said of the Ancient Greek traditions Lyacos borrows heavily from: the Chorus in the trilogy’s second installment, With the People From the Bridge, comes to mind the odyssey of Z213:EXIT the brutal abstractions of Greek sculpture in The First Death and how this contingency is taken into account when writing “a version that could possibly make sense in the context of our own tradition.” But Sullivan lets this doubt suffice as an answer: “Could this version have been produced originally in English?” Recognizing the fact fails to answer it, let alone, comfort us only discomfort translates, bringing Poena Damni to a truly real fluid-filled birth. The translator of the triology, Shorsha Sullivan, who is also a Classics professor at Leeds College, distinguishes Lyacos from the Greek poets that “slide easily into the mainstream of European Modernism” and those localized poets whom “lose savour in translation.” “Lyacos’ case differs,” Sullivan continues, because “he speaks to us as fellow human beings from an almost non-local viewpoint, using western tradition but not committing himself to any side.” Understanding is a place, for those of this school of thought, towards which knowledge only exacerbates the distance. The composite units: Z213:EXIT, With the People From The Bridge, and The First Death, are ridden with the lack of euphony that belongs to the invisible canon of defeat to which Cioran belongs. Despite the distance, Lyacos’ recently translated Poena Damni trilogy revels inside Cioran’s head. Six years later and southeasterly, Dimitris Lyacos would be born in Athens. Histoire et Utopie was published, likely to the same acclaim (and rejection of acclaim) that marked all Cioran’s career after 1950. In France, in 1960, this question pressed itself upon the Romanian-born Emil Cioran. “What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?” WITH THE PEOPLE FROM THE BRIDGE, 61 pages
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