“The oats had vanished at last”

Lord, it is time. Summer was very great, as the poet says. The children and their parents must leave grandmother’s country manor for the city.


And then it’s time to return.

Adalbert Stifter, “Cat-Silver,” in Motley Stones, trans. Isabel Fargo Cole (New York: New York Review Books, 2021).

The rhythms of the natural world are very much part of Stifter’s fiction. But so is natural or supranatural catastrophe. That’s still to come in this story, along with an astonishing rescue performed by a wild child before she disappears into the forest.

I’ve borrowed the first line of Ted Berrigan’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Herbsttag”: “Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.” “Very great” seems to me a perfect way to characterize a summer. How was your summer, man? It was very great.

More Stifter
A passage from The Bachelors : A passage from Rock Crystal : A passage from “Tourmaline”

[Ted Berrigan’s translation of Rilke appears as “Autumn’s Day” in Nothing for You (1977). The first line, quoted here, appears as the first line of Sonnet IV in The Sonnets (1964). The absence of commas from “potatoes cabbage and turnips” is deliberate: as the translator explains, Stifter sometimes omits commas “to create subtle rhythmic affects, convey shifts of tone in spoken dialogue, or allow the items in a list to merge in one unbroken flow.” Cat-silver is a name for mica.]