This tongue tells us almost with intelligible words how good and how happy and how peaceful everything is - I found another Adalbert Stifter story

How exciting.  I came across an Adalbert Stifter story that I had not known was available in English.  It's "Granite" also known as "The Pitch-Burner" (1849/ 1852).  A translation by Jeffrey L. Sammons can be found in The German Library, Volume 37, German Novellas of Realism I (1989).

I can hear your clucks of dismay.  "You had not read German Novellas of Realism I?  Were you born in a hayloft?  Just look at that title - German Novellas of Realism I!"  I know, I know.

The story itself is perfectly typical Stifter, perhaps ur-Stifter.  A Stifter-like boy tells us about the day he got in trouble for smearing pitch all over the house, and how his kindly grandfather helped him out.  Sweet, sentimental Stifter.  One way the grandfather helps tiny Adelbert is by telling him an old story about their region, a story about the plague, and children who lose their parents and wander through the woods, eating nuts and committing saintly acts.  Weird, weird Stifter.

The grandfather links the old story, horrific as it is, to specific features in the landscape.  He in fact begins by having the grandson name each feature:

"That is the lake forest, where there are dark and deep lake waters."

And still to the right of the Lake Forest?"

"That is the Boulder Stone and the Chair Forest."

"And farther right?"

"That is Tusset Forest."  (p. 15)

I don't mean to suggest this is any special prose - a lot of Stifter's writing is pretty ordinary - but to highlight a Stifterian method, here performed more systematically than I have ever seen.  The exact details of the landscape, real or imagined, must be precisely identified.  Then humans are set within the landscape.  The grandfather tells his grandson about the hay-gleaners in the forest meadows, and the fungi collectors, and the pitch-burners:  "You see, these columns of smoke all come from men who do their jobs in the forest" (15).  If Stifter is a nature writer, he's an odd one.  It's the connections between people and nature that he writes about again and again.

I don't expect to make any converts to Stifter, so I will leave "Granite" behind here.  I was converted to him by W. G. Sebald, who really taught me to read Stifter.  Sebald directed me to Stifter's landscapes, and his quiet uncanniness.  Stifter's sweetness and placidity then seem less like flaws or outdated modes than veils of his real aesthetic purpose.

I wish someone would translate some more Adalbert Stifter stories for me.  "Granite" was as good, or at least as Stifterian, as any I have found.

The title quotation (p. 18) is torn from its context, a bit.  That tongue is of a bell, not a storyteller.