Title Page

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Introduction

MELVILLE

Translator’s Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

MELVILLE was a turning point for Jean Giono, the great French novelist, as he made a transition between his Pan Cycle (including the recently translated Hill), works of an almost folkloric quality that highlighted his native Provençal landscape, and his Hussard Cycle, in which he invested his extraordinary energies into fashioning unforgettable characters. As he said in a later interview, “In the preceding novels, nature was in the foreground, the character in the background . . . I called ‘chronicles’ the whole series of novels which put humanity before nature.” The most famous of these chronicles is The Horseman on the Roof, which in 1995 the French turned into one of their best historical films, starring Juliette Binoche and Olivier Martinez.

Of course literary things are never that simple. The two cycles overlap; for instance, the characters in the early books are already very strong and the Provençal landscape plays a major role in his chronicles as well. In the foreground of Horseman on the Roof may be Giono’s very Stendhalian young Italian hero, Angelo, but directly behind him is the flourishing landscape of Giono’s province, never more lush than as a background for the devastating cholera pandemic of 1832.

It’s very fitting that Giono made his transition during the composition of Melville. It must be one of the strangest homages from one major author to another. It began as the introduction to his translation of Moby-Dick (the first in French). He worked on the translation with a French friend, Lucien Jacques, and an English antiques dealer, Joan Smith (whom he paid), between 1936 and 1939, though he’d been reading it for years before that. He would take it as his “foreign companion” on his hikes and then sit against a tree trunk and read it in the fields when he had a free moment . . . imagining the branches in the wind were rolling waves. Melville and the translation of Moby-Dick were published separately in book form in 1941. Giono’s is still the standard translation into French. Smith had provided a word-for-word translation, though she quickly became irritated by Melville’s style. Letters reveal that Jacques did most of the work, but he admired Giono’s revisions and additions.

Melville is sometimes called a “literary essay,” but in fact it is a short, lyrical novel about Herman Melville, his trip to London in the autumn of 1849 to present his novel White-Jacket to his publishers, and his chance encounter with an Irish nationalist called Adelina White (she is purely fictitious). Although, at the beginning, the book sounds biographical, it quickly blossoms into a poetic self-portrait. Giono’s Melville is a womanizer, well-recognized, successful, a big, burly man who sleeps in the nude and has a hairy chest. He wears secondhand sailor’s clothes, which he much prefers to a top hat and cutaway, his London uniform. An angel challenges him to write a big, important book. Melville resists, exhausted in advance by the prospect, but finally, back in America, he throws himself into the massive undertaking of Moby-Dick, which he writes for the beguiling Adelina. Unfortunately, she must have died before she could read it; even on his own deathbed Melville is still hoping to hear from her. She has become his angel. According to Giono, Melville is so depressed after Adelina fails to respond to him, he enters a thirty-year period of silence. (In fact, he immediately wrote Pierre, or the Ambiguities after Moby-Dick, and then another novel, many stories, the novella Billy Budd, poems about the sea, and an epic poem about Jerusalem.)