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23/01/2024. Foreign/Own: Snowy pages
January 23, 2024:
Participants in the Foreign/Own project met at the first program of the new year to read, discuss and translate the “snowy pages”. The theme of the program at the National Library of Karelia was books in which snow plays a special role.
As Gaston Bachelard, French philosopher and art critic, noted, “winter is older than all seasons.” Snow has long been used by authors as a vivid image, as a metaphor, as an artistic means to create a certain atmosphere in a book. However, as the program participants saw, snow has a wide range of meanings in literature.
Depending on how the author uses snow in the work, it can be a symbol of purity, joy, originality and purification, or, on the contrary, death, threat, secrecy, or non-existence. The genres of the books discussed on the program turned out to be just as wide: from the fairy tales “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C. S. Lewis and “Moominland Midwinter” by T. Jansson to the detective stories “The Snowman” by J. Nesbø and “Smilla and Her Sense of snow" by P. Høeg. Not only Scandinavian authors are close to the poetics of snow; Turkish writer, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk fills the novel “Snow” with meaning, and Japanese writer and also Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata creates the melancholic and sensual “Snow Country”. Snow as an artistic element turns out to be a connecting thread for talking about the original literature of different countries and times.
The participants learned more about the story “Snowmama” by a British writer D. Winterson, which was pre-selected for reading and discussion. During the program, participants shared their impressions and opinions about the story and found parallels with other works they had previously read. With the editorial support of Tatyana Baranova, teacher of the Karelian language, the participants translated fragments of the story into the Livvi-Karelian language. They will continue to work with the text at the next lessons.
Readers of the National Library of Karelia have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the books discussed at the program in translations into Russian; some works are presented in English, Danish, Karelian. All publications are presented in the electronic catalogue.
