Camus’ first two paragraphs (reproduced in the first excerpt – Texte A – with all four translations in Fascicule des textes de référence) contain 21 sentences Gilbert spreads them out over three paragraphs, with a total of 16 sentences. For instance, simple French sentences characterizing Camus’ intuitive or sensorial mode of expression are altered, so that Gilbert’s text appears more “connected”, with longer (and thus fewer) sentences.
To suit his own prose, he confidently restructures the paragraph and sentence divisions. Set aside from the source text, it reads as both elegant and poetic English prose, with a distinctly British flavour. The first English translation of L’Étranger was penned by a sixty-three year old distinguished man of letters. A graduate of Hertford College at Oxford, he advised James Joyce on the Auguste Morel translation of Ulysses, wrote a critical work entitled James Joyce’s Ulysses and edited the first volume of Joyce’s letters. An important mid-twentieth-century literary figure, Stuart Gilbert also translated Camus’ La Peste and works by Saint-Exupéry, Malraux, Sartre, Simenon and Cocteau, among others, and corresponded with TS Eliot, Malraux, Richard Ellmann. Finally, the late poet Matthew Ward published another translation, The Stranger, in New York in 1988.ĥ Examining the four English translators of the novel, however briefly, may help clarify some of their choices – and lessen their “invisibility”. At the same time, a first American translation by Kate Griffith, in Washington, D.C., based on an annotated – and censored ! – French edition of Camus’ novel published in the US 1, thereby eliminating the legal difficulty of publishing an American translation. In 1982, Joseph Laredo published his retranslation, The Outsider, in London. By 1985, this rendering had sold over three million copies. Over time, Camus’ novel established itself as a respected, canonic text, as did Gilbert’s translation, remaining unchallenged for thirty-six years. First translated into English by Stuart Gilbert in 1946 as The Outsider (London), it was published concurrently in New York as The Stranger. He revised the novel in 1947 and made additional revisions between 19, increasing its already marked concision.
2 Albert Camus was twenty-nine when he wrote L’Étranger, published in Paris in 1942, which he closely followed with Le Mythe de Sisyphe.
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