To celebrate the New York Review of Books Classics re-release of Jean Giono's Melville: A Novel, translator Paul Eprile will be in Toronto to talk about Melville, his previous Giono translation, Hill, and what it's like to translate an acclaimed French author, who is, himself, imagining and interpreting a classic American novel. Penguin Random House Canada and Type Books are very proud to present this singular work.

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.