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The Stranger demanded of Camus the creation of a style at once literary and profoundly popular, an artistic sleight of hand that would make the complexities of a man’s life appear simple. Despite appearances, though, neither Camus nor Meursault ever tried to make things simple for themselves. Indeed, in the mind of a moralist, simplification is tantamount to immorality, and Meursault and Camus are each moralists in their own way. What little Meursault says or feels or does resonates with all he does not say, all he does not feel, all he does not do. The “simplicity” of the text is merely apparent and everywhere paradoxical.
Camus acknowledged employing an “American method” in writing The Stranger , in the first half of the book in particular: the short, precise sentences; the depiction of a character ostensibly without consciousness; and, in places, the “tough guy” tone. Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Cain, and others had pointed the way. There is some irony then in the fact that for forty years the only translation available to American audiences should be Stuart Gilbert’s “Britannic” rendering. His is the version we have all read, the version I read as a schoolboy in the boondocks some twenty years ago. As all translators do, Gilbert gave the novel a consistency and voice all his own. A certain paraphrastic earnestness might be a way of describing his effort to make the text intelligible, to help the English-speaking reader understand what Camus meant. In addition to giving the text a more “American” quality, I have also attempted to venture farther into the letter of Camus’s novel, to capture what he said and how he said it, not what he meant. In theory, the latter should take care of itself.
When Meursault meets old Salamano and his dog in the dark stairwell of their apartment house, Meursault observes, “Il était avec son chien.” With the reflex of a well-bred Englishman, Gilbert restores the conventional relation between man and beast and gives additional adverbial information: “As usual, he had his dog with him.” But I have taken Meursault at his word: “He was with his dog.”—in the way one is with a spouse or a friend. A sentence as straightforward as this gives us the world through Meursault’s eyes. As he says toward the end of his story, as he sees things, Salamano’s dog was worth just as much as Salamano’s wife. Such peculiarities of perception, such psychological increments of character are Meursault. It is by pursuing what is unconventional in Camus’s writing that one approaches a degree of its still startling originality.
In the second half of the novel Camus gives freer rein to a lyricism which is his alone as he takes Meursault, now stripped of his liberty, beyond sensation to enforced memory, unsatisfied desire and, finally, to a kind of understanding. In this stylistic difference between the two parts, as everywhere, an impossible fidelity has been my purpose.
No sentence in French literature in English translation is better known than the opening sentence of The Stranger . It has become a sacred cow of sorts, and I have changed it. In his notebooks Camus recorded the observation that “the curious feeling the son has for his mother constitutes all his sensibility.” And Sartre, in his “Explication de L’Etranger ,” goes out of his way to point out Meursault’s use of the child’s word “Maman” when speaking of his mother. To use the more removed, adult “Mother” is, I believe, to change the nature of Meursault’s curious feeling for her. It is to change his very sensibility.
As Richard Howard pointed out in his classic statement on retranslation in his prefatory note to The Immoralist , time reveals all translation to be paraphrase. All translations date; certain works do not. Knowing this, and with a certain nostalgia, I bow in Stuart Gilbert’s direction and ask, as Camus once did, for indulgence and understanding from the reader of this first American translation of The Stranger , which I affectionately dedicate to Karel Wahrsager.
The special circumstances under which this translation was completed require that I thank my editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, for years of patience and faith. Nancy Festinger and Melissa Weissberg also deserve my gratitude.