For this week’s reading, I understand all the warnings now about how Moby Dick is a difficult and boring read. I could not really grasp the entirety of what I was reading, but I am sure that as I continue on, I will better understand it.

From what I could gather from the readings, the way the Etymology sections starts off creates an important question as to the lack of inclusion on all matters of whaling and the ocean, and whether that assists in the lessening of the significance of either. Melville’s telling of whaling and exploring the sea, while not entirely non-fiction, but also not entirely fictional, may create a gap in the reader’s understanding of the extent of the dangerous and unintentionally frivolous travels of the ocean. The quote, “While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true” by Hackluyt announces the importance of the accomadations made towards important areas of information for the benefit of assisting our learning of it in our own language. While somewhat off topic, we can see this in translations of many other texts, for instance: The Grettis Saga, which has been translated into various different languages. In the beginning of each of these books there is a disclaimer made by the translators that the significance and the grammatical choices made in the origonal texts are often lost through translation, making the texts become modified and in theory, un-truthful in their translation of the original accounts.