Sex in Translation: Melville, Mayoux, Ashbery

Abstract: The idiom of coming out became paradigmatic for homosexual expression and social recognition in the era of gay liberation, and in its early years, academic queer theory developed very much alongside this idiom. The present essay aims to historicize “outing” in queer Melville scholarship, the better to understand how and why that idiom appeared as it did. This historicization relates the story of Melville par lui-même , a 1958 half-biographical, half-critical volume published in France by a not-particularly-queer French professor, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, and rapidly translated into English by a gay American poet, John Ashbery. The translation is characterized by a stylistic commitment to diminishing or downplaying the frankly homoerotic episodes in Melville’s texts. This essay argues that Ashbery’s attempts to subdue Mayoux’s accounts of Melville’s queerness in translation are, paradoxically, the translator’s covert means of recognizing and expressing Melville’s homoerotic episodes to those in the know. The English translation of Melville par lui-même illuminates an idiom of expressive indirection, of, as it were, not coming out, which appears as its own coded form of homosexual expression and social recognition in the 1950s and sets the stage for queer readings of Melville in the 1990s.