Spirit of Rhaetia: The Call of the Holy Mountains: The Myth of Raetia

Aлександр Петрович Барyффи

Dec 2020 · LiteraryJoint Press

About this ebook

Intertwined with the tantalizing, never-ending quest for a man's own roots and sense of self, the novel narrates the mysterious, epic story of the ancient people of the Alps, the untold history of mythical Rhaetia: a land largely identified with the Rhaetian Alps, a country that in 600 B.C. comprised what is today’s central and south-west Switzerland, Grisons and Ticino, Liechtenstein, the entire Tyrol and Vorarlberg in Austria, Valtellina in the north of Lombardy, and the Adige valley in Italy. At the time of the Roman conquest it extended to parts of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg states in Germany, south of the river Danube, including the territories of the Vindelici people, who occupied the northern part of Rhaetia and whose chief town was Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg).

Arguably, it is the human lamp itself, the fire of sheer existence, the barrier to our reconnection with the powerful forces of nature, and the beyond world, that of ancestry. What is it today the Spirit of Rhaetia? Does it still exist? Or was it just a dream in the darkness of the night that turned into fire, exhausted itself, and faded into oblivion?

Our times are doomed, as we are presently confronted with the most powerful forces that blind our eyes, drain our strength, turn us into mere cannon fodder at the mercy of the demons of modernity. Like never before, a man's soul screams for freedom, his very flesh and bones ache for truth; his scorching thirst for meaning is unutterable and unbearable; he seeks for the burning sun, the cool moon, the glimmering skies, the very earth that never changed; he turns to the land of the ancestors for salvation, thus he turns to the everlasting and everstanding mountains.

Now, one man will ascend them one last time, to rejoin his ancestors and meet the Almighty God.

About the author

Aлександр Петрович Барyффи (b. 1973) is a writer, poet, historian, and researcher in the fields of American, Germanic, and Russian literature.

His published works include: "Adua Mar" (2000, Poems), "Icarus" (2006, Poems), "Jersey Blues" (2007, Poems), "24 Racconti" (2008, Short Stories), "The Poems of Trieste and Five Poems for the Game of Soccer" (2013, Translation, Umberto Saba), "Lunga è la Notte" (2015, Novel), "The Forgotten amongst the Great: a Collection of the Best Poems Translated in English" (2015, Translation, Vincenzo Cardarelli), "The Tales of Franz Kafka" (2016, Translation, Franz Kafka), "Le Poesie di Robert Frost nella Traduzione Italiana" (2016, Translation, Robert Frost), "Midnight 30, American Poems" (2016, Poems), "The Poems of Giovanni Pascoli (2017, Translation, Giovanni Pascoli), "Montale's Essential: The Poems of Eugenio Montale in English" (2017, Translation, Eugenio Montale), "Giuseppe Ungaretti, the Master of Hermeticism, Translated In English" (2018, Translation, Giuseppe Ungaretti), "Gabriele D'Annunzio: The Collection of Poems in English" (2019, Translation, Gabriele D'Annunzio), and "Umberto Saba: the Collection of Poems. Umberto Saba's Poetry Translated in English" (2020, Translation, Umberto Saba).

He has translated for international literary magazines various authors, including: Franz Kafka, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Antônio Álvares de Azevedo, Fernando Pessoa, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Alfonsina Storni, Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Marina Tsvetaeva, Konstantin Simonov, Umberto Saba, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Eugenio Montale, Giosuè Carducci, and Ada Negri.

Website: www.baruffi.me