Opening up with Herman Melville's Typee

Quid Pro Quo had already recovered The Encantadas, by Herman Melville, in a magnificent translation by Pep Julià, a sublime volume that the admired writer J. L. Badal had recommended to me with emphasis and with good reason. Now the beloved publisher from Pollença insists on this happy recovery operation with a Melville that is worth reading beyond Moby Dick, a marvel more than deservedly famous that has achieved universal fortune. However, Melville is much more than Moby Dick: it is one of the great bastions of modern American literature, an author capable of transmuting adventure, travel, the sea, nature, violence, and the clash between cultures into supreme literary matter. Typee, his first published book, written based on experiences lived during his years of sailing the South Seas, invites us to rediscover the power of a genius who already from the beginning possessed a more than ambitious literary capacity.Typee is a formidable adventure story, but it would be unfair to reduce it to just that. Herman Melville constructs a narrative in which the experience of an exotic world is readjusted as a profound exploration of the clash between cultural systems. The writer observes the customs, rituals, hierarchies, sensuality, and violence of this new world with a fascinating combination of curiosity, irony, and descriptive capacity, and turns estrangement into a laboratory for the radical displacement of one's gaze. Here we find a still-young Melville, yet already possessed of an astonishing faculty for transforming external adventure into moral and intellectual learning. Teresa Bauçà Bosch's translation has the merit of keeping such energy alive, of making a text flow that demands agility but also precision, and of preserving the tension between descriptive exuberance, the sense of adventure, and the concerns that mark the work. Bauçà Bosch—who has already translated authors such as Wells, Tagore, Turgenev, Hawthorne, Emerson, Mary Shelley, and Dickens—once again demonstrates marked solvency here.We must defend this literature with enthusiasm, the kind that takes you far, the kind that brings you closer to unknown territories and, above all, the kind that changes our way of looking at things. Typee belongs to the lineage of books that help us re-mem-ber why we read classics: not because they are excellent museum pieces but because they challenge, move, and teach us. Quid Pro Quo, which has built much of its catalog on a determined commitment to recovering totems that maintain a fertile contemporary dialogue, offers a new and brilliant opportunity to return to the immense Melville. Enjoying Typee is to penetrate other lives, different and striking, a creative and empathetic possibility that confirms an enormous, complex, contradictory, and beautiful world, just what we need in these chaotic times full of absurd fear and hatred.