Lansel, Peider

Peider Lansel, (born Aug. 15, 1863, Pisa—died Dec. 9, 1943, Geneva), Romansh leader of the revival of Rhaeto-Romance language and culture and one of its most accomplished lyric poets.

Spending every summer at his family’s native village of Sent in the Engadine, Lansel devoted himself to the collection and critical examination of Rhaeto-Romance texts of the previous four centuries, work that was crowned by publication of the lyric anthology La musa ladina (1910, 2nd ed., 1918) and amplified in Musa rumantscha (1950) and by his study Ils retoromans (1935), translated into English, German, Italian, French and Esperanto. In his nostalgic and exquisitely controlled verse (definitive ed., Il vegl chalamer, 1920), he was able to sublimate a tragic love affair of his youth in the celebration of the beauty of his Alpine valley, with its age-old culture rooted in the soil. His poems and stories (Grusaidas albas, 1931) signalled the rebirth of Rhaeto-Romance literature, purging it of impurities and turning it back to its beginnings in the 16th century.