Originally published to promote his French translation of Moby-Dick,
Jean Giono's Melville: A Novel is an astonishing literary compound of
fiction, biography, personal essay, and criticism.
In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his
novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America,
Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what
happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the
country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish
nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel's challenge--to express
man's fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece.
Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated
into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and
his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a
preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary
essay, 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.
Paul Eprile was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation's 2018
Translation Prize for his translation of Melville.
