The Sacred Mountain

Description

Notre Dame University has launched a new series, the Murex Series, under the headline Lebanon by Lebanese authors.

It is basically made up of selected works by great Lebanese authors ranging from literary to political to social and historical writings about Lebanon. The books are translated and published in an elegant cover that bears the slogan of the Murex connotatively and denotatively.

The aim of this series is to bring forth the civilizational aspect of Lebanon in its cultural, historical and social dimensions and to present it to the Western reader as a rich subject matter that enables him to understand the Lebanese presence on the international map.

This project was introduced in 2003 and is ongoing with the publication of an average of one or two books per year.

Book: The Sacred Mountain

This is a long poem on the characteristics of Lebanon. It is divided into three parts: enthusiasm, pain, and memory. This piece is considered to be among the best works of the French-Lebanese poetry movement that flourished in the 1930’s. It has been translated into English for the first time.

This book falls under a project that is being undertaken by Notre Dame University of Louaize and that aims at choosing a number of literary and intellectual works on Lebanon and translating them into English in order to promote the cultural aspect of Lebanon in the western milieu, especially in the US.

Translator’s Note:

The message of Charles Corm is as real for the Lebanese today as it was when he wrote it in the last century. Who would dare alter his deep patriotism, and his enormous love for a country that has suffered so throughout the ages? But as much as Charles Corm portrays intense suffering, he also emphasizes the courage of a people who thought they traveled to the four corners of the earth, always harkened to the silent calls of their beloved homeland.

Translators of poetry acknowledge the difficulties inherent to such an endeavor. Transposing the full prosodic panoply of meter and rhyme would not only prove tedious to the reader of English, but also counter-productive to the purpose of bringing Charles Corm to the contemporary reader. It has therefore been the aim of the present translator to emphasize the eternal message offered by Corm to the genuine Lebanese soul without, however, sacrificing the original text.

The Sacred Mountain – Winner of the Edgar Allan-Poe, International Prize for Poetry, Paris, 1935

Author: Charles Corm
Translated by: Dr. Carol Kfouri
Revised by: Dr. Paul Geahchan
Edition: 2004
Language: English
Number of pages: 135