As a dilettante translator I find this book fascinating,
even though I don’t read French.
Literary texts are sacred and you cannot alter
them; translations on the other hand are a more or less faithful reflection of
the original text, but can be altered, changed, or renewed. Did Proust write
"Remembrance of Things Past" or "In Search of Time Lost" or
“In Search of Lost Time"? My favourite is Gabrielle Roy's "Bonheur
d'occasion" published in English as "The Tin Flute". As a
general point, a translation transmigrates one text for another; often the
"mistakes" don't matter (to the monoglot reader). On the other hand,
the title is the only part of a work of literature known even to those who
haven't read it. I note in passing that étranger “doesn’t just mean "stranger"
but also "foreigner", and in the colonial context, that could have
been a possibility too. It's a bit like 9 to 5 by Sheena Easton and 9 to 5 by
Dolly Parton.
I am very much of the view that it is a
disservice to Camus to read L'Etranger as an allegory of abstract
existentialism. It is essentially a reflection on the unique colonial
experience that was French Algeria, and, in that aspect, the book should be
taken as underlining that that experience was tragic, as for the Pied-Noirs in
general, and tragic in a personal sense for Camus himself. Camus was one of the
greatest representatives of liberal universalism of the last century, and yet
the liberal universalism that he expounded left him an
outsider/stranger/foreigner within Algeria, once the war of independence began,
and at the same time intellectually homeless in the France whose civilisation
he was steeped in and to which he was culturally and politically committed. Had
Camus lived to pass his 101st birthday, as with Herman Wouk, he might have felt
vindicated by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe, but I am sure
that he would have found the War on Terror to leave him feeling even stranger,
foreign and an outsider in relation to the things that he cared about. When one
surveys the horrors of the contemporary, who does not conclude that they stand
as a stranger, outsider or foreigner as to what unfolds?
Meursault is a lonely, asocial, anomic outsider
but (or because of it) he is also a foreigner, in that he is an European Frenchman in
Algeria. Algeria is everywhere in the book and Algerians are glimpsed, as
foreign characters themselves. Camus, an European Frenchman born to dirt-poor
parents in Algeria, was acutely aware of that hiatus between perceived
nationalities, which had yet to develop into the Algerian War. Camus saw
himself primarily as a philosopher and a political writer. His novels always
had to read from a political perspective - The Plague being a case in point. "The
Foreigner" would be provocative, as the accepted notion then was that
Algeria's inhabitants were French. But "L'Etranger" carried the same
provocation, and IMHO on purpose. I would go for The Outsider as the correct
translation, personally, but that's for three simple reasons:
Being also a "translator", I would by instinct
(all due of course to personal experience) have opted for “Outsider” over “Stranger”...Meursault
is part and not part of this world...he seems often to inhabit it in body
only...his mine free, critical, questioning...he's far beyond those around him...outside
of the expected norm... of course that could all be a subjective response on my
part, due to the way i identify with the main character...In Spanish the
translation of the book takes another direction altogether... El Extranjero...
that is, the "Foreigner"... which in many respects could be both a
stranger and an outsider...or perhaps even a fusion of both... A better title
for the book could have been THE MISFIT, because the idea for the main
character is that he doesn´t fit in the world where he lives and the morality
of that society.
If Camus wrote it now, the book presumably
wouldn`t be published, or at best would be torn apart by the critics. A book
where the non-white, non-Christian locals barely get a look-in. How absolutely
appalling.
NB: Despite being, since the 1930s, a staunch
defender of indigenous Algerians against the injustices of the French colonial
system, Camus was against Algerian independence, fearing that there would be no
place for European Algerians in an independent Algeria ruled by the FLN, and
that it would be disastrous for the Algerians too. While his hopes for a more
enlightened French approach were illusory, his fears were not misplaced. The
challenges of semiotics can be rather intense, especially in relation to geniuses
such as Camus... It's one of my favourite novels, and my copy has always been
the British translation.
