Abstract
This article discusses a 1945 Flemish translation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick that has been attributed to the literary critic Paul de Man and yet has been unduly neglected by de Man scholars. The article takes issue with the claim that the Moby-Dick translation entails a radical break with de Man’s newspaper writings of previous years. De Man’s motivation for translating Moby-Dick is considered in relation to the reception of the book in the framework of the Conservative Revolution in Europe. It is further shown that de Man probably took inspiration from a 1941 French translation by Jean Giono, which proved a vehicle for warring ideologies in occupied France. Analysis of the de Man translation focuses both on the paratextual framing and on passages where his own perspective disrupts the univocity of the text. The purpose of drawing attention to the continuities between de Man’s wartime journalism and the Moby-Dick translation is to arrive at a better understanding of the pervasiveness and fractured nature of the totalizing ideologies shared by many intellectuals in wartime Europe, which offered a fertile breeding ground for, but were by no means reducible to, the Nazi doctrines.
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