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PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published in French as L’Étranger by Librairie Gallimard 1942
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2012
This edition publish ed in Penguin Classics 2013

The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted

Cover photograph © Rankin

ISBN: 978-0-141-90425-2

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

The Outsider

Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, then became a journalist, as well as organising the Theatre de l’équipe, a young avant-garde dramatic group. His early essays were collected in L’Envers et l’endroit (The Wrong Side and the Right Side) and Noces (Nuptials). As a young man, he went to Paris, where he worked on the newspaper Paris Soir before returning to Algiers. His play, Caligula, appeared in 1939, while his first two important books, L’Etranger (The Outsider) and the philosophical essays collected in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), were published when he returned to Paris. After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1940, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He edited and contributed to the underground newspaper Combat, which he had helped to found. After the war, he devoted himself to writing and established an international reputation with such books as La Peste (The Plague) (1947), Les Justes (The Just) (1949) and La Chute (The Fall) (1956). During the late 1950s, Camus renewed his active interest in the theatre, writing and directing stage adaptations of William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun and Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Camus was killed in a road accident in 1960. His last novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man), unfinished at the time of his death, appeared for the first time in 1994. An instant bestseller, the book received widespread critical acclaim, and has been translated and published in over thirty countries. Much of Camus’s work is available in Penguin.

Sandra Smith was born in New York and studied at NYU, the Sorbonne and Cambridge University. She won the French American Foundation Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize, as well as the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. She is a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, where she teaches French language and literature.

Translator’s Note

Readers may wonder why a new translation of The Outsider is necessary. Primarily, it is essential to create new versions of classic works in another language because language constantly evolves. The original text is immutable yet translations should be written in a style that is accessible to the modern reader while conveying the spirit of the foreign text. Idiomatic speech in particular needs to be rendered in a way that feels true to the original without sounding dated. This is especially important in The Outsider, as Camus writes in the first person. For this reason, I listened to a recording of Camus’s own reading of the novel on French radio in 1954, to try to replicate the nuances of his rendition.

Another demanding aspect of translation arises from the fact that a single word in another language often has multiple connotations that are difficult to encapsulate. A translator is therefore forced to make linguistic choices based on a subjective interpretation of the work. The title of the novel itself offers the perfect example of this phenomenon. In French, étranger can be translated as ‘outsider’, ‘stranger’ or ‘foreign er’. Our protagonist, Meursault, is all three, and the concept of an outsider encapsulates all these possible meanings: Meursault is a stranger to himself, an outsider to society and a foreigner because he is a Frenchman in Algeria.

In some cases, I have used more than one word in English to translate a specific term in French so as not to detract from the richness of Camus’s implications or its multiplicity of meaning. In one of the most important scenes of the novel, for instance, Camus uses the metaphor of knocking on the door of malheur. In French, this single word has a wealth of associations: destiny, disaster, unhappiness, misfortune, accident, ordeal, mishap, tragedy. To convey this density of interpretation, I chose to expand the phrase, translating it as ‘the fatal door of destiny’.

There are two additional interpretations in the existing English-language versions that, in my view, do not adequately reflect the original text. The first is the translation of maman as ‘Mother’. ‘Mother’ is quite formal and fails to convey the intimacy implied in French by maman, yet the British equivalent, ‘Mummy’, and the American ‘Mommy’ would sound too juvenile. I chose to use ‘Mother’ in the famous first line of the book, to reflect Meursault’s shock at receiving the telegram that announces her death in such a terse, formal manner. ‘Mama’ is a better translation elsewhere, indicating a closer, more affectionate relationship, despite the protagonist’s apparent oddness. This point is poignantly demonstrated at the end of the novel when Meursault states that he understands that his mother had been happy, so no one has the right to cry over her. The contrast between Meursault’s behaviour towards his mother and his use of the word maman when referring to her is a paradox that adds considerably to the feeling of tension and dislocation in the novel.

The second instance appears at the very end of the book, where Camus writes: ‘je m’ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde’ (‘I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world’). For some reason, tendre is rendered as ‘benign’ in most previous translations, a choice that fails to capture the paradoxical nuance of ‘tender’. As Camus once wrote in his notebooks: ‘Si tu veux être philosophe, écris des romans’ (‘If you want to be a philosopher, write novels’). This one word at the most critical point in the novel radically changes the entire philosophical perspective of the work.

An additional challenge I faced when translating this work was how to convey the allusions to religion in the novel. Camus famously remarked that Meursault was ‘the only Christ we deserve’. He went on to explain that he meant no ‘blasphemy’ by this; he was simply pointing out that his protagonist was prepared to die rather than lie, or ‘play the game’.

There are many key scenes in the second part of the novel that deal with Christianity and its ethical link to the judicial system. One of the most important allusions to religion, however, is in the final line of the novel. Camus has his protagonist say: ‘Pour que tout soit consommé’, an echo of the last words of Jesus on the Cross: ‘Tout est consommé.’ As the translation of this sentence in the King James Bible is ‘It is finished’, I chose to render this extremely significant phrase as ‘So that it might be finished’, retaining the formal language of the Bible to help guide the reader towards the religious implications of the words.

Throughout the translation, I have retained the direct, staccato style that Camus uses to reflect Meursault’s persona. The most lyrical passages in the novel are the striking descriptions of nature, in particular the sun and sea imagery, and I have followed Camus’s approach in these sections.

Translating this important work has been a great honour and I am grateful to Penguin for this opportunity. I would also like to thank the following people for their help and support: my husband Peter, my son Harrison, Dr Paul Micio, Anne Garvey, Dr Jacques Beauroy, Lucas Demurger and my colleagues at Robinson College, Cambridge.

Sandra Smith
May 2012

Albert Camus

THE OUTSIDER

Translated by Sandra Smith

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

The Outsider

Translator’s Note

PART ONE