11 Dec 2012 02:04:12
"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas." So, famously, opens Albert Camus's 1942 novel L'Etranger, but it's intriguing to see how differently those two sentences have been translated, despite the simplicity of Camus's construction. In Joseph Laredo's terse, widely read 1982 translation, he renders the opening as: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." In Sandra Smith's new translation, she inserts a possessive pronoun: "My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know", thereby restoring Camus's protagonist, Meursault, to a dislocating state of shock rather than the cold indifference of Laredo's version. Smith, a Cambridge University don and translator of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, has emphasised the absurdist fault lines of Camus's novel through a less laconic, more expansive translation than Laredo's. Camus's Algiers-set tale – of the office worker Meursault gunning down an Arab on the beach and subsequently being sentenced to death by the Franco-Algerian state for refusing to express regret – is partly a philosophical exploration of what Camus called "the tender indifference of the world", but it's equally a humanist paean to Meursault's everyday epicureanism. In this spirit, Smith is particularly sensitive when constructing Meursault's memories of Algiers and of "a life which offered… the most subtle but most persistent of joys: the scent of summer, the neighbourhood that I loved, a certain type of sky at night".
Camus called Meursault "a man who… agrees to die for the truth" and characterised him as "the only Christ that we deserve". Smith fortifies the novel's biblical resonances by translating the final sentence as "So that it might be finished, so that I might feel less alone, I could only hope that there would be many, many spectators on the day of my execution and that they would greet me with cries of hatred", playing on Jesus's last words in the King James Bible ("It is finished"), to which Camus's original referred but which becomes lost if translated literally.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote that "neither learning nor diligence can replace imagination or style" in the art of translation, but Smith's version of L'Etranger is both erudite and agile. It deserves to become the standard translation of Camus's masterpiece.
