Typee
Typee (German publishing title "Taipi") is a short story by Herman Melville that appeared in 1846.
content
The first-person narrator Tom, together with a comrade named Toby, deserted the whaler Dolly during a stopover in the bay of the Marquesas island of Nukuhiva . The two seek refuge with one of the local islander tribes, the Typee , in a remote valley on the island. Once there, they are welcomed in a friendly manner, but practically held captive.
In the course of the story, the everyday life and some customs of the Typee are described, including family life , the different roles of the sexes and the warlike relationship with other tribes on the island.
Toby is the first to escape with the help of a trader in the boat, while Tom can only later make his way back to the bay over land with the help of a tribal-free islander and hired on an American ship there.
Release history
The story was first submitted to the Harper & Brothers publishing house in New York , but rejected there because "the story seemed too fantastic to be credible". It then appeared for the first time under the title Narrative of a Four Months' Residence among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands in February 1846 by John Murray in England . Before that, however, Melville had to add three more chapters of facts to make the narrative more believable.
Still, doubts remained until July 1, 1846, a letter from Richard Tobias Greene ("Toby") involved in the adventure appeared in the Commercial Advertiser magazine in Buffalo, New York state, confirming the truth of the story.
In August 1846 the work was also published by Wiley & Putnam in New York. At pressure from publishing partner John Wiley, a revised version was published, which in particular lacked numerous passages with sexual and religiously critical content that Wiley found unpopular .
To the work
In Typee , Melville processes some impressions from his trip with the whaler Acushnet four years earlier , his desertion and the time spent among the Typee .
Since it was first published, literary criticism and science have discussed the extent to which the narrative reports facts and where Melville intervened literarily, for example to keep the narrative flow interesting. Melville goes beyond a mere factual report in Typee and interprets Polynesian society in comparison to North American society . In some places his story clearly criticizes the colonization policy of European powers and Christian missionary work in the Pacific region .
Some of Melville's descriptions, particularly the cannibalism of the Typee or the lifting of a taboo just so Tom can canoe with a young woman , appear today as Melville's literary freedoms. Melville has also extended the length of his stay, which the ship's diaries show to be around four weeks, to four months.
Melville's Mardi from 1849 is considered a purely fictional version of Typee .
Editions of the narrative
- Herman Melville, Taipi. Hardcover Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin, 2nd edition 1980, licensed edition from Dietrich'schen Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig 1953.
- Herman Melville, Taipi. Hardcover from Hoffmann and Campe, Leipzig, 1967.
- Herman Melville, Taipi. Adventure in the South Seas, Paperback Ed. Bücherbär / Arena, 1978 ISBN 3545321592 .
- Herman Melville, Taipi. Berlin: Construction Tb, May 2001 ISBN 3746660971 .
- Herman Melville, Typee. Tuttle: Everyman Paperback Classics, 1993.
- Herman Melville, Typee. A peep at Polynesian Life. Penguin Classics, 1996.
- Herman Melville, Mardi and a journey there, Btb bei Goldmann January 2000 ISBN 3442725658
- Herman Melville: Typee, new translation including previously untranslated passages from the fragment of the original manuscript. Mareverlag, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-86648-614-0 .
Web links
- http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1900 - Text of the English edition at Project Gutenberg