![]() ![]() Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident. Celebrated in intellectual circles, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. 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". Born in Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus published The Stranger- now one of the most widely read novels of this century- in 1942. 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. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." In Sandra Smith's new translation, she inserts a possessive pronoun: "My mother died today. In Joseph Laredo's terse, widely read 1982 translation, he renders the opening as: "Mother died today. 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. ![]()
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