Author(s): Jean Giono

Fiction

Moby-Dick looms large in the world's imagination. But by the mid-1930s-eighty years after it first appeared in English, no one had yet translated Melville's great sea-novel into French. The Provencal novelist Jean Giono fell in love with the book. He inspired his friend Lucien Jacques to join him in the project of rendering Melville's stirring prose. After they finished, Gallimard, their publisher, persuaded Giono to write a preface. Giono had been unwilling at first to accept - the translation had taken a few years to complete, and he was eager to move on. Gallimard brought him around by encouraging him to introduce Melville's rich biography to the French public, who knew little or nothing about the American author. The result, issued as a separate volume in French and now as an NYRB Classic: an unparallelled intercultural creation, part preface, part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Gallimard continues to classify it as "Un essai," a literary experiment. Melville: A Novel is an intimate homage from one great writer to another, across time and space, a true meeting of French and American minds. Paul Eprile's meticulous translation of this startling text brings the exchange full circle.