Lost in Translation?: A Note on Sexuality in L’Etranger

Abstract

FOR several years after its appearance in 1954, Gilbert's English translation of Albert Camus' great novel, The Stranger, originally published in French in 1942, aroused little controversy among literary scholars. Nowadays, especially following publication of Matthew Ward's superior translation of roman in 1988, applause for Gilbert's rendering is exception rather than rule. About that time, Camus scholar Patrick McCarthy pointed out (106-7), seems ill at ease with earthy, working-class flavour of The Stranger. English Showalter agreed, noting existence of two detailed critiques of Gilbert's translation that had appeared in early 1970's (26). Two American scholars, John Gale and Helen Sebba, he observed, have written articles pointing out most glaring instances [of Gilbert's 'infidelity' to Camus' text] and analyzing cumulative effects of individual variations; readers who know at least a little French might want to look them up. Most translators and literary critics would agree that his advice remains valid today. Although Helen Sebba's article, Stuart Gilbert's Meursault: A Strange 'Stranger,' appeared nearly forty years ago, it continues to occupy an honored place in literature on L'etranger. (1) A well-known translator of several works, her opinion carried extra weight, even though she essentially pointed out obvious: that Gilbert's translation of Camus' novel was often stilted and unfaithful to original, pervaded by a stiff-upper lip, British accent throughout. Sebba begins by asserting that discrepancies between Camus's text and Gilbert's translation that we instinctively excuse as products of translator's Englishness nonetheless prima facie distort or detract from Camus's meaning. Small deviations from French text, which at first might seem to be no more than minor adjustments that an idiomatic English style requires, prove on closer examination to blur or destroy vital clues to Meursault's character and behavior, she argues, and finds that Gilbert's anemic translation negates Meursault's idiosyncratic mode of being. Gilbert's manipulations of text to accord with what he thinks it should say deprive Meursault of his simplicity, attachment to Nature and immediate moment, and his uniqueness. Scattered throughout text are elusive understated indications of nature of his sense of life, she asserts. By failing to recognize these, or by deleting or distorting them, English version makes The Stranger conventional precisely at point where his strangeness can best be comprehended (340). Sebba vigorously questions validity of Gilbert's She believes it obscures Meursault's irrationality, instead rendering him a logical, pragmatic individual who understands consequences of his actions. her opinion, the English version [Stuart Gilbert's] of Camus' novel shows certain psychological inconsistencies, not present in original, which stem directly from translation. She aptly points out: In trying to maintain tone of common speech, Gilbert all too often smoothes away insights embodied by Camus in seemingly trivial factual details and substitutes purely conventional ideas or responses or reactions for what are in fact indications of a very idiosyncratic mode of being, of Stranger's cosmic sense of life (334). However, Sebba criticizes Gilbert's translation without acknowledging that her critique may be applicable to other translations of L'Etranger, and indeed is an inevitable, intrinsic concomitant of translating. Sebba stresses validity of her characterization of Meursault, as an individual whose distinctiveness she believes Gilbert's translation does not sufficiently evoke. Meursault's uniqueness, she says, lies in feeling at one with cosmos, albeit tenuously. (She seemingly overlooks theme of Camus's simultaneously written classic, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), which famously emphasized alienation of human beings from a Nature that they cannot feel at one with, especially inevitable Death imposed on us all, which we cannot escape no matter how hard we try. …