Translator Paul Eprile wins prize

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Paul Eprile has won the French-American Foundation 2018 Translation Prize for fiction for his translation of Melville: A Novel by Jean Giono.

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 is part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance and part unfettered fantasy.

Eprile’s expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle, said the foundation.

“If I hadn’t had the chance to live in the hills near Creemore in my formative years; if I hadn’t worked for a local farming family and sat at their tables; and if I hadn’t known a true countryman and trickster like Cliff Lindsay, I could never have appreciated the work of the Provençal novelist Jean Giono the way I do,” said Eprile.

The translation is published by New York Review Books.

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