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.).