Evil in a World of God 
 The shades of night were falling fast, 
 The rain was falling faster, 
 When through an Alpine village passed 
 An Alpine village pastor. 
 Sorry, I couldn't resist! This opening quatrain of A. E. Housman's marvelous parody of Longfellow's "Excelsior" popped to my mind unbidden at one point in Jeremias Gotthelf's 1842 novella, when the Alpine pastor (or rather priest) is indeed on his way through the Swiss village to save the villagers from the Devil, ravaging the community in the form of a black spider. Though Gotthelf (real name Albert Bitzius) was himself a pastor, and deadly serious in his vision of the battle between Good and Evil. Really, there are only two reactions to such high-mindedness: to laugh and to admire. I did both, and my admiration is considerable. 
 As I said recently about the Peirine Press, I would also pick up almost anything published by New York Review Books if it looked intriguing, and here the 18th-century cover of a woman's face split to show the skull beneath, complete with colonizing spider, both attracted and repelled me. The clincher was the translator's name: Susan Bernofsky, who has done such wonderful work with Jenny Erpenbeck, not to mention Robert Walser, Hermann Hesse, and Franz Kafka. But her skills are not confined to modernist authors. How perfectly she captures the pastoral perfectionism of the opening section, the verbal equivalent of German Nazarene painting: 
 From the forest's gilded edge the blackbird trilled its aubade while the amorous quail intoned monotonous Minnelieder from amid the flowers sparkling in the dew-bespangled grass, and high above the dark firs, lusty crows danced nuptial roundelays or else cawed tender lullabies above the thorny little beds of their unfledged chicks.* 
 It doesn't go on quite so lushly, but Gotthelf takes his time building up this perfect picture of a village baptism in the Emmenthal as a vision of what life can be like when "God's in his heaven and all's right with the world," as Robert Browning put it. It is quite a lovely picture, actually, like some of the happier passages in Dickens. Sentimental, yes, but absolutely necessary as a prelude to showing its opposite. 
 In the midst of the baptismal feast, an old grandfather tells a story dating back to the Middle Ages, when the castle on the hill above them was inhabited by a debauched order of knights whose feudal master, Hans von Stoffen, forces the villagers into a task that they can complete only by striking a bargain with the Green Huntsman, a.k.a. Satan. This is a baptismal tale too, for all the Devil wants in return is an unbaptized child. What follows is a horror story that might almost come from Gotthelf's contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, except that Poe was never so explicitly moralizing. I found myself reading with fascination, and with gratitude to Bernofsky and NYRB for unearthing this period gem. You can almost measure the strength of a religious belief by the quality of the cautionary tales warning against its opposite, and this one's a doozy. 
 But then a strange thing began to happen, irreligious renegade that I have become. Instead of reading as Pastor Bitzius intended, with the fantastic tale set against an Eternal Truth, I began asking whether both stories were not equally fantastic? Is there anything to choose between the story of a black spider growing on a woman's cheek where the Devil has kissed her, and the rituals of mystic names, sacred symbols, and holy water? So far from authenticating truth, does not this macabre tale show it up also as fantasy? Small wonder that I started giggling in church like a schoolboy! But I am very glad to know this novella nonetheless, whether as an historical document or simply as a colorfully tall tale. 
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 All the qualities that might be thought excessive in Bernofsky's translation are in fact found in the original. Really, she has done an outstanding job! 
 Aus vergoldetem Waldessaume schmetterte die Amsel ihr Morgenlied, zwischen funkelnden Blumen in perlendem Grase tonte der sehnsuchtigen Wachtel eintonend Minnelied, uber dunkeln Tannen tanzten brunstige Krahen ihren Hochzeitreigen oder krachzten zartliche Wiegenlieder uber die dornichten Bettchen ihrer ungefiederten Jungen.