First, this blog replaces my previous blog, thecosmoplitanlawyerblogspot.com . Second, unlike that earlier blog, the present one is primarily meant as a record of my readings. It is not meant to suggest that others will be or should be interested in what I read. And third, in a sense, it is a public diary of one who is an alien in his own American culture. A person who feels at home just about anywhere, except in his birthplace . . . America.
Sunday, January 28, 2018
THINKING ABOUT MELVILLE AND MOBY-DICK
Jean Giono, Melville: A Novel, translated from the French by Paul Eprile, with an introduction by Edmund White (New York: New York Review Books/Classics, 2017) (From the back cover: "Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provencal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface granting him usual latitude. The result was this literary essai, Melville: A Novel--part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Paul Eprile's expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle.).