Melville, far from the expansive, self-confident man Giono portrays, was in fact touchy, taciturn, and shy—and bisexual. Giono was the one with the big personality, and the character “Melville” is his alter ego. In point of fact, Giono wasn’t much interested in the historic Melville. He was interested in the text and the big, manly Whitmanian figures of the New World. Like many Europeans, after the war Giono was fed up with the timidity of much Continental prose—or its erudition. He turned to Faulkner, Dos Passos, Melville, and to Whitman himself.

Translating Moby-Dick was no easy task; rendering Melville’s thundering, biblical-Shakespearian prose into French was like translating Macbeth into Alexandrines: “La plus petite chose peut avoir une signification” doesn’t really capture the diction of “the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings,” anymore than “la joie démoniaque des vagues” renders the “madness and gladness of the demoniac waves.” But the translation is certainly faithful and spirited. The two languages remain essentially different—English with its enormous vocabulary, its Celtic fancifulness, its polyglot origins, and French with its limited vocabulary and strict Academy rules.

Lest we forget, Melville was not just typically Anglo-Saxon. He was one of the strangest, most fanciful of visionaries. Hawthorne noted how restlessly his friend wore himself out going back and forth from being a believer to being an atheist; we could say he was a “mystical atheist.” The whalers look into the sea:

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sight.

Later, a black whaler named Pip drowns because his mates fail to save him in their haste to harpoon a whale. Or, they save his body, but his oxygen-starved brain has been destroyed:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense. . . .