Hill

Deep in Provence, a century ago, four stone houses perch on a hillside. Wildness presses in from all sides. Beyond a patchwork of fields, a mass of green threatens to overwhelm the village. The animal world—a miming cat, a malevolent boar—displays a mind of its own.

The four houses have a dozen residents—and then there is Gagou, a mute drifter. Janet, the eldest of the men, is bedridden; he feels snakes writhing in his fingers and speaks in tongues. Even so, all is well until the village fountain suddenly stops running. From this point on, humans and the natural world are locked in a life-and-death struggle. All the elements—fire, water, earth, and air—come into play.

From an early age, Jean Giono roamed the hills of his native Provence. He absorbed oral traditions and, at the same time, devoured the Greek and Roman classics. Giono’s startlingly original fusion of idiomatic storytelling and Homeric and Virgilian myth took Paris and New York by storm in 1929. Hill, his first novel and the first winner of the Prix Brentano, comes fully back to life in Paul Eprile’s poetic translation.

Jean Giono (1895-1970), one of the foremost French authors of the twentieth century, wrote thirty works of fiction. Many have been translated into English, includingThe Horseman on the Roof, Second Harvest, and a fictionalized memoir,Blue Boy. A quarter of a million copies of his inspirational fable, The Man Who Planted Trees, are currently in print.

Translator, editor, and poet Paul Eprile lives on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario, Canada.

David Abram is a cultural ecologist and geophilosopher, and the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, andBecoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.