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JEAN GIONO was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Largely self-educated, he started working as a bank clerk at the age of sixteen and reported for military service when World War I broke out. After the success of Hill, which won the Prix Brentano, he left the bank and began to publish prolifically. Imprisoned at the beginning of the Second World War for his pacifist views, he was once again wrongly imprisoned for collaboration with the Vichy government and held without charges at the war's end. Despite being blacklisted after his release, Giono continued writing and achieved renewed success. He was elected to the Academie Goncourt in 1954. Bill Johnston is the Chair of the Comparative Literature Department at Indiana University. His translations include Wieslaw Mysliwski's Stone Upon Stone, and Magdalens Tulli's Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, Flaw and In Red. His 2008 translation of Tadeusz R żewicz's new poems won the inaugural Found in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award.
Giono's writing possesses a vigor, a surprising texture, a contagious joy, a sureness of touch and design, an arresting originality, and that sort of unfeigned strangeness that always goes along with sincerity when it escapes from the ruts of convention. --Andre Gide, unpublished letter For Giono, literature and reality overlap the way that waves sweep over the shore, one ceaselessly refreshing the other and, in certain wondrous moments, giving it a glassy clearness. --Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic Giono's voice is the voice of the realist; his accents are the accents of simplicity, power and a passionate feeling for a land and a people that he must love as well as understand. --The New York Times Giono's prose is a singularly fine blend of realism and poetic sensibility. Essentially a poet, he has an acute faculty of penetration, a lucidity of spiritual vision, and a tender sympathy. --The Washington Post Giono creates an atmosphere that is both contemporaneous and timeless...the epic instinct is active. --Ray C. B. Brown I'm reading Bill Johnston's translation of Jean Giono's Ennemonde, and have come to love the way Giono nestles a kernel of a story inside descriptions of the natural world and its inhabitants, human and otherwise. These plots are organic; they grow out of the soil. --Stephen Sparks of Point Reyes Books via Twitter
