Striding the Borderlands: Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s Great Fear on the Mountain, by Alice-Catherine Carls

Striding the Borderlands: Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s Great Fear on the Mountain, by Alice-Catherine Carls Book Reviews [email protected] Thu, 09/05/2024 - 14:03 Caroline Cingria, C. F. Ramuz, pastel (1903) / Images courtesy of Noël CordonierLumen Obscurum Light and darkness are a major part of the global human experience; their contrast is a foundation of life and has always been the source of meditations and rituals. In Genesis, the creation of night and day separated order from chaos. Absolute light and darkness exist at the two extreme ends of a prism. St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross defined both as the presence/absence of God. The brain responds to light and darkness. The Latin poet Virgil coined the term lumen obscurum (dark light), which the French playwright Pierre Corneille phrased as obscure clarté and the Polish poet Joanna Pollakówna as avare clarté.[1] The Polish poet Aleksander Wat and the German artist Anselm Kiefer titled one of their works Lumen obscurum. In his newly translated 1926 novel, Great Fear on the Mountain (Archipelago, 2024), Swiss-French writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947) uses the term obscure lumière—rendered by translator Bill Johnston as “dim light.” Merging light and darkness indicates a tension between seeing and not seeing, feeling and not feeling, knowing and not knowing. It indicates a pause during which fate hangs in the balance. It contains a vortex similar to the... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2024-09-05 19:03:58 UTC ]

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