Chapter 4 Translation sequence 4.The Fate of Melville and the Fate of Moby-Dick

Knowing and understanding Melville is the key to understanding. Once you understand it, Melville will understand it at a glance. And after we have done some research on Melville and both, we found that their destinies are so similar. Melville's ancestors were a prominent Scottish family. As early as Melville's grandfather's generation, he had already come to the United States and participated in the War of Independence, which had a certain influence. Melville was born in New York in 1819.Originally, Melville could have spent his life in the upper class, but unfortunately, when he was just entering his teenage years, his father, an importer in New York, went bankrupt, and the family suddenly disappeared. Wealth has fallen into poverty.

Melville was twelve years old at that time, and the death of his father made the family situation worse.At the age of fifteen, Melville had to enter the society after two years of school life. He started as a bank clerk, worked as a clerk, a farm worker and an elementary school teacher successively. He has tasted the ups and downs. In 1837, eighteen-year-old Melville, full of resentment and resistance to society, fled to a sailing ship and started his sailing career. The first voyages only aroused his desire more strongly, and from 1841 he began to sail on whaling ships. In the next three years, Melville traveled to many places in the world with the whaling ship, which greatly broadened his horizons.Not only that, he also fought against the despotism on the whaling ship together with other partners on the whaling ship, and was imprisoned for riots and other reasons.

Melville later joined the USS America, where he served until he disembarked in Boston in 1844, ending his seafaring career. The sailing career from 1841 to 1844 had a great influence on Melville's life, and a considerable amount of time was spent on the whaling ship, so Melville's thoughts were basically established. The ups and downs, rich life and strong thoughts constitute the foundation of Melville's writing career. His works are a reflection of his life and a reflection of his thoughts. The creation of it began in February 1850 and ended in the summer of 1851, when it was published in the same year.

He was thirty-two years old that year. This should have been a glorious age, and it should have created even greater brilliance. Today's readers cannot imagine that this epic work in the history of American literature not only did not cause a sensation at the time, but also received a lot of criticism. However, it is regrettable and puzzling that it did not bring to Melville what it should have brought to him, because people who were contemporaries of Melville did not understand this work, let alone recognize him as unprecedented in literature. the value of. When Melville was alive, no one knew him, and no one regarded him as a master. He was still a little man, spending the rest of his life on a meager salary.

So a great man was wiped out and ruined, which was the tragedy of that era. The tragic character, the tragic work, the tragic author, the tragic result, around Melville, around, everything is tragedy. The creation of tragic works is not a tragedy in itself, only when the person who creates the tragic works becomes the protagonist in the real tragedy, the real tragedy occurs. In 1891, Melville died in New York, his birthplace, in the indifference of the world.Three days after his death, the "New York Times" published the sad news in an obscure place. However, it took a longer time to attract the attention of Melville, and it was not until the 1920s and 1930s that Melville's next generation could understand it, and some people were surprised to say: My God, this is a masterpiece. ah!

Today, Melville and his books are among the most widely studied authors and works in the United States, if not the world. Melville's life was a life of disappointment and a life of embarrassment. Melville's is a great work, a place of strength and thought, an epic in the history of American literature. The whereabouts from rich to poor determined his bumpy but shining fate, and the twists and turns of fate and the constant struggle against fate determined the intensity of his life and the strength of his works. So we think of Cao Xueqin in China, how similar he is to Melville. It can be seen from this that when we go from poverty to prosperity, neither thoughts nor great men of thought can be produced. Both thoughts and great men of thought are produced by shouting during the process of falling from the peak to the bottom.