"Shadow of the Altar": The Middle Eastern Sacrifices of Billy Budd

Abstract: This essay reads Billy Budd in Middle Eastern translation, exploring the novella as rendered into Persian and Hebrew. Contextualized within the prolific careers of Aḥmad Mīr'alā'i and Abraham Regelson, Billy Budd constructs, I argue, an unexpected bridge between regional letters and religious legacies. Ironically paralleling Iranian and Israeli audiences, the Billy Budd editions produced by Mīr'alā'i and Regelson mirror Muslim and Judaic heritages, concurrently amplifying and inverting the sacrificial core of Melville's "Inside Narrative."