比理巴德（英文原版，Billy Budd, Sailor）
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基本信息·出版社：PocketBooks
·页码：130 页
·出版日期：1999年
·ISBN：0671028332
·条形码：9780671028336
·包装版本：1999-03-01
·装帧：平装
·开本：32开
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内容简介Billy Budd, Sailor has been called the best short novel ever written. In his brilliantly condensed narrative prose, Herman Melville fashions a legal parable in which reason and intellect prove incapable of preserving innocence in the face of evil. For all those who feel themselves threatened by a hostile and inflexible environment, there is special significance in this haunting story of a handsome sailor who becomes a victim of man's intransigence.
Since its posthumous publication in 1924, Billy Budd has become one of the acknowledged masterpieces of American literature.
作者简介Herman Melvillewas born in 1819 in New York City. After his father's death he left school for a series of clerical jobs before going to sea as a young man of nineteen. At twenty-one he shipped aboard the whaler Acushnet and began a series of adventures in the South Seas that would last for three years and form the basis for his first two novels, Typee and Omoo. Although these two novels sold well and gained for Melville a measure of fame, nineteenth-century readers were puzzled by the experiments with form that he began with his third novel, Mardi, and continued brilliantly in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. During his later years spent working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville published only poems, compiled in a collection entitled Battle-Pieces.
媒体推荐Spotlight Reviews
Reviewer: Melvin Pena (Evanston, IL United States)
Herman Melville's novella "Billy Budd" recounts the tragic story of a young man impressed into service aboard the British man-of-war 'Bellipotent' in the late 1790's. Billy is called the 'Handsome Sailor' no less because of his angelic features than for his absolute moral purity and innocence. Initially aboard a merchantman, where he is revered by his fellows and treated accordingly, once aboard a warship, Billy is not greeted by such universal admiration. John Claggart, the master-at-arms, the policeman of the ship, fosters an intense homoerotic hatred of Billy, drawing the young man into the commerce of realistic human interaction.
Melville does a fantastic job in so short a work of characterization. From the main characters, Budd, Claggart, and the captain/philosopher Starry Vere, to minor characters of significance like the old Dansker, Melville gives carefully detailed and finely nuanced renderings of the players and their roles and responses to the events of the story.
Claggart's conflict with Budd takes on special urgency with the 1790's problem of mutinies aboard British sea-going vessels. Vere and his court must try to distinguish moral responsibility from legal necessity to judge the fatal interactions between Claggart and Budd. Melville is sensitive to late 18th century philosophical currents in regard to both American independence and the French Revolution - Discussions of rights and nature are scattered through the text. Complicating these strains are theological currents of good and evil, innocence and natural depravity. "Billy Budd" is a fine work, and wonderfully complex.
This excellent edition, compiled and edited by Hayford and Seals, is the appropriate one for the scholar or the completist. It includes extensive notes and critical interpretations (sadly only through the initial publication of this edition - 1962), photo reprints of Melville's manuscript, and textual commentary. Absolutely worth reading and rereading.
Reviewer: Arlan Ebel (Aurora, Colorado United States)
Whether its considered a novella, a short novel, or whatever else, no matter, Billy Budd is the greatest work of its kind ever written and one of the great works of world literature. Whether it fits neatly into any traditional literary category is of no importance. "Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges."
Such rare substance and depth condensed into a mere 90 pages creates intense heat and blinding light, an incandescence, that only genius could then fashion into the long, smooth, jewel-like chains of the poetic prose sentences that make up this book. Melville forges them in the white-hot smithy of his soul then links them together, beginning to end, giving us the revelation story of Billy Budd. "Welkin-eyed" Billy Budd is a young British merchant sailor, the "Handsome Sailor", the embodiment of spontaneous, good-natured vitality and innocence, naturally loved by his fellow sailors, an "Angel of God." But he is also the "fated boy" with a seemingly minor weakness of stuttering when he is upset, a weakness that proves tragic in a world of darkness. Billy is forcibly enlisted onto a war ship to serve the British king in his struggle against the post-revolutionary France of Napoleon. On ship Billy meets the very intelligent, proper, conservative, highly regarded Master-at-Arms, Claggart. Behind his facade, Claggart's soul is as weak and depraved as Billy's is good and strong. The proud Claggart secretly admires Billy beyond endurance and grows to loathe and detest him because of this. Claggart goes to Captain Vere and falsely accuses Billy of mutiny. Billy is brought in and accused to his face. The shocked Billy is inwardly paralyzed, reduced to "a strange dumb gesturing and gurgling", by the mystery of such maliciousness and evil. He can't comprehend it and doesn't know how to defend himself. Like an innocent tormented animal he strikes out and Claggart falls silent, permanently silent. Then the real horror at the heart of this story is revealed. Captain Vere, the embodiment of all conventional nobility, courage and wisdom, deceives himself with his lofty rationality and with much sentimentality, but no more real feeling than a puppet, he follows protocol and, though he knows Billy is innocent, condemns him to be hanged and given over to the sea. Cuffed with darbies (manacles or irons) and bound in hammock the "Angel of God" is dropped into the darkness.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,
I am sleepy and the oozy weeds about me twist.
This story combined with the author's ongoing pronouncements reveals a realm of American art where Melville stands alone. He is America's greatest, only truly prophetic, artist. Enter this little book openly, seriously, and it will serve you for life. Read it again and again until you hear its voice.
编辑推荐Billy Budd, Sailor has been called the best short novel ever written. In his brilliantly condensed narrative prose, Herman Melville fashions a legal parable in which reason and intellect prove incapable of preserving innocence in the face of evil. For all those who feel themselves threatened by a hostile and inflexible environment, there is special significance in this haunting story of a handsome sailor who becomes a victim of man's intransigence.
Since its posthumous publication in 1924, Billy Budd has become one of the acknowledged masterpieces of American literature.
目录
Introduction
Billy Budd, Sailor
Literary Allusions and Notes
Critical Excerpts
Suggestions for Further Reading
……[看更多目录]
