Reunion with Pierre Loti’s “Ramuntcho”. A review. – Culture

In retrospect, Roland Barthes classified him as a “hippie dandy”, the Goncourt brothers made fun of him because he put on make-up and made himself taller with thick shoe soles. He stole his Turkish lover’s tombstone from Istanbul’s Topkapi Cemetery, and Sarah Bernhardt let him into her bedroom, but only for viewing. Because with the polished skeleton of a young man and the coffin lined with silk, the bedroom of the stage star was sensationally extravagant even in the fin de siècle. Pierre Loti was also a star. The Académie Française preferred him to Émile Zola, and the painter Paul Gauguin was inspired by Loti’s book on Tahiti to stay there.

Pierre Loti mainly wrote travel reports and depictions of landscapes. His trips to the desert, through Persia and China found a readership hungry for exoticism. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw in him a mirror of the Europeans’ view of what was alien to them. Loti’s stories, told in the respective setting, were the means of transport for his descriptions. The novel “Ramuntcho” from 1897, which has now been reprinted in German, can be seen as a declaration of love for the Basque Country. In France, the novel had around twenty editions and was filmed several times.

The title hero Raymond, or Ramuntcho, is a boy from a mountain village in the French part of the Basque Country, near Hendaye, the illegitimate son of Franchita and a talented pelota player. He and Gracieuse, daughter of the proud Dolorès, have been lovers since childhood. They want to get married and plan to emigrate to America, where Ramuntcho has an uncle with whom they could start a new life. Dolorès despises Franchita as sinful and is therefore against the union. Ramuntcho suffers from the reset. Loti shapes him on the one hand as a natural “uneducated big boy”, on the other hand he allows him a nuanced psychology, how he sees the “simple and simple people who are happy in their modest way” in contrast to himself.

Ramuntcho belongs to a gang of smugglers: When it gets dark and the customs officers prefer to make themselves comfortable, they carry heavy boxes of jewelry, watches and Lyons silk over mountain slopes, through forests and swamps to Spain. Sometimes they cross the border river Bidassoa on wobbly barges on a black night, sometimes over steep, slippery goat paths. “The land with the dense branches, which you cross under the oppressively high but invisible mountains, is completely traversed by deep, rugged gorges, in which the torrents rush in the green darkness under the canopy of leaves. The oaks, beeches, chestnuts, Those who have been living on an always fresh and wonderful juice for centuries are getting bigger and bigger. Over this whole furrowed geology lies a huge, motionless carpet of plants that has covered it with its fresh, firm coat for thousands of years and softened its ruggedness. And the foggy one, almost dark skies, which are well known in the Basque Country, complements the impression, adding a kind of universal devotion in which things seem to be lost. A strange penumbra falls on it from everywhere, from the trees first, in thick gray veils that rise spread over the branches, and then from the great Pyrenees, hidden behind clouds. “

Open detailed view

Accordingly, the moon shines over the romantic, secret meetings of lovers. Pierre Loti reflects the feelings and moods of his characters in the description of nature. The landscape and its vegetation, the scents and colors, the light and the weather make up a considerable part of the book, as well as the lives of the people, their customs and characters.

For today’s taste it is occasionally a little too emphatic how Loti describes the connection people have with their land, and what kind of immutable group of people it is that has been indigenous there for ages and beyond death. However, it has to do with what stands out as an exaggerated solemn solemnity: Anyone reading “Ramuntcho” in the original discovers from the first lines on a persistent meter, like a song that pulls you along as you read. Not only is the linguistic rhythm with syntax and emphasis different in German, some words lose their melodious sound courlis is the curlew in German. It may seem mannered, especially at the beginning of the book, how Loti – probably for the sake of meter – assigned a sounding adjective to almost every noun. But in the end the content corresponds to the high note when Ramuntcho’s love failed due to the betrayal of Gracieu’s mother. His disappointment, pain and sadness are then of the appropriate size. So the new edition of this book proves to be an enrichment.