:: L’heure entre chien et loup ::

"The hour between dog and wolf, or the time between dog and wolf. I'm told it's a common expression in French, referring to the hour between the end of the afternoon and the beginning of the evening. More simply, the twilight hour.

The hour when the dog and wolf are indistinguishable. The text implies that symbolically, good and evil (dog and wolf) are lost in the gloom of twilight."

At twilight the world burns red. There, a shadow creeps down the hill. Is it a friendly dog? Or a vicious wolf? This is the hour when I can't tell... L'heure entre chien et loup.

Translation © 2008 D. Bannon.

Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love

"...the expression entre chien et loup [literally, between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can't be distinguished from each other] suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day. The colour grey, for instance, and the hour when night approaches as inexorably as sleep, whether daily or eternal. The hour when street lamps are lit in the city, and which children try to drag out so that they can go on playing, though their eyes, suddenly active, are closing in spite of themselves. The hour in which - and it's a space rather than a time - every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment." (p. 254) Referenced Site