Great Fear on the Mountain

A haunting, allegorical Swiss masterpiece centered around a posse of villagers as they brave dark elements to ascend a mountain, thicketed with lore

Teeming with tension, this immersive, rhapsodic story transports readers to the Swiss mountainside, bringing to mind the writing of Thomas Mann while offering character studies as vivid and bracing as Eudora Welty’s.

Feed is running low in a rural village in Switzerland. The town council meets to decide whether or not to ascend a chimerical mountain in order to access the open pastures that have enough grass to “feed seventy animals all summer long.” The elders of the town protest, warning of the dangers and the dreadful lore that enfolds the mountain passageways like thick fog.

They’ve seen it all before, reckoning with the loss of animals and men who have tried to reach the pastures nearly twenty years ago. The younger men don’t listen, making plans to set off on their journey despite all warnings. Strange things happen. Spirits wrestle with headstrong young men. As the terror of life on the mountain builds, Ramuz’s writing captures the rural dialog and mindsets of the men.

One of the most talented translators working today, Bill Johnston captures the careful and sublime twists and turns of the original in his breathtaking translation.

Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878—1947) was a Swiss novelist whose realistic, poetic, and allegorical stories of man against nature made him one of the most iconic French-Swiss writers of the 20th century. As a young man, he moved to Paris to pursue a life of writing, where he befriended Igor Stravinsky and later wrote the libretto for The Soldier’s Tale (1918). Ramuz pioneered a Swiss literary identity, writing books about mountaineers, farmers, or villagers engaging in often tragic struggles against catastrophe.

Bill Johnston is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His translations include Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay; Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, Flaw, and In Red; and Ennemonde by Jean Giono. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award for Tadeusz Rozewicz’s new poems, and in 2012 he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize and Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for Myśliwski's Stone Upon Stone.