Preparation
In choosing a passage to translate from L’Étranger, I was naturally drawn to one of the most difficult sentences in the book. Wikipedia assures me that the second most highly contested line across translations—after the very first line of the novel—is found in the last paragraph of L’Étranger. The line is:
Comme si cette grande colère m’avait purgé du mal, vidé d’espoir, devant cette nuit chargée de signes et d’étoiles, je m’ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.
The phrase “je m’ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde” is different in each of the book’s four translations. Just trying to find the French sentence based off of the first English translation in Wikipedia is interesting. I press Ctrl + F and search for “univers.” I find nothing. The French does not speak of an “univers,” but of a “monde.” The translator has taken some liberties.
Instead, I search for “indifférence,” hoping that the English translation has stuck to its Latin roots. Indifference is a cognate—and no faux ami at that. With this, I find the line and the passage I’m to translate.
Allons-y
Translation draft 1
A problem I’ve always faced with translation is being too literal. Part of me finds something poetic about literal translation. Literal translation can make a work sound more abstract; the work becomes a puzzle. It forces the reader to become translator.
Some of the literal translations I’ve produced before remind me of Google’s translation feature. Once in class, we examined translations of a poem from Spanish to English. Some translations were extremely similar while others verged on adaptation. Adding to the translations we looked at, Chris copy and pasted the Spanish poem into Google translate. Of course, the result was wild. It didn’t quite make sense, but I found it beautiful.
This is a problem I face when translating. I tend to favor awkward word choice. I like to introduce a sense of foreignness to my work, even in English. In a personal essay, I wrote about my family’s Sunday morning routine after moving from the Bronx to the suburbs of New York. I wrote: “Though we’d quit the Bronx, my dad still roused us for the Sunday commute.” My high school English teacher loved the word “quit.” I did too, but I couldn’t bring myself to explain that I’d chosen the word “quit” from the French quitter (“to leave”). To me, “quit” is special because it reminds me of French. But its meaning is completely different in English. It becomes edgy, and it sounds new. Its use is new.
I need to work past personal style in my translation of L’Étranger. Despite personal preference for words that distance the reader from the work, I need to focus on writing Camus. It is hard. Meursault narrates in a way that translates so well to the choppy diction I love. The text is full of ambiguities. As the translator, I’m tempted to leave the text as confusing as possible. I like to imagine that confusion rend notre narrateur plus intelligent, plus compliqué. But this seriously affects readability.
In this translation, I’m truly fighting myself. As I translate, I question the phrase in its original French. Would a native speaker find this sentence awkward? If so, how would I translate this awkwardness to English? If not, how readable of a translation do I create? I want the English reader to work as little or as much as the French reader does.
The first version is a testament to my struggle. I’ve created what I believe to be the most naked translation possible. It is devoid of flourish. I try to keep the syllable count as close as possible to the original, using large words only when necessary. The translation still needs lots of work. For this, I’m eager to get feedback from the others. I want to know how well I can get by on barebones translation. I want to keep the sense of abstraction and distance, but I know that I’ll have to refine the language. I’ll have to make some hard decisions.
Translation draft 2
With my second draft, I wanted to start first by looking through the comments from Irma and Regina. Irma has addressed three of the phrases I highlighted as particularly tough to translate. I looked into the expression “ne valoir une cheveu de femme,” and it turns out the expression is not standard. It is Camus’s creation, so I will keep the strange English translation. However, I’ve cleaned it up to make it a little less awkward.
Many of Regina’s comments confirm similar thoughts and questions I’ve had. They focus in on the kinds of awkward moments I discuss in journal one. Regina also writes that she believes the last sentence of the translation could be stronger. I agree. When reading the Bernofsky piece on translation, the idea of making the sentences at the beginning and end of a paragraph strong was particularly interesting to me. Similarly, Bernofsky feels a sentence itself should end strong, even if that means changing up the sentence structure (as in her example from Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha). Working through this version of my translation, I’ve tried to make sure my sentences don’t sacrifice strength for a more French grammatical structure.
With the second draft I’ve started to toy a bit with the idea of consulting other translations. For my first translation, I went in blind. The only outside influence I’d had was seeing a translation or two of the sentence, the one of many translations. I’m not sure it’s quite what I want, but I’m scared that outside influence may impact my translation. It may inform the translation in a way that is not my own. My goal with this second draft is to come the closest to creating a complete draft. Only after draft two do I plan on consulting other translations.
For this second draft, I made a change I particularly like. At the end, I translated “charged with.” It carries a sort of double sens that the previous translation did not carry. The narrator is charged almost in a criminal sense. The lexicon the passage uses is interesting; the language is blatantly legal at some points and at others more subtle.
Something I’ve come across in the translation is the word “condamné.” I first encountered it in a French course I took at Smith, called “Intellectuals as Activists.” We read Victor Hugo’s Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné. In class, I never had to think about how to translate the word “condamné.” Now, with L’Étranger, I’ve realized that there’s no one-word equivalent in English. It translates much less stylishly to “condemned person,” or—if we must pick a gender—condemned man or woman. The English title is The Last Day of a Condemned Man. This title seems limiting, but what would be a better translation of “condamné”?
This is more of a problem for English-language readers of Hugo’s work and less of a problem for readers of The Stranger. The condamné is likely a man.
Translation draft 3
In class the other day, Felipe mentioned the strain that “staying close to the original” puts on the translator. I’ve definitely felt this working with L’Étranger. I’m afraid to make changes, for fear of moving too far away from what I perceive to be the original. Translating a classic adds another layer of worry. A translator must handle the work—a work that has “stood the test of time,” that has touched countries and generations—with care.
After Mara Faye Lathem’s visit to class this past Thursday, I’ve come to realize that my translation—in its close literalness—is too far from the text. I now consider the second draft of my translation incomplete. It’s halfway between a first and second translation: Slightly smoother, but not coherent. I believe my second draft, if published as is, would hinder the English reader’s understanding of the text. For this, I’ve called it draft 1.5 and have decided to rework it into a true second draft. There is a lot of work to be done, and this time around, I plan to take more liberties.
During Mara’s visit, we looked at two translations of the opening passage from a contemporary work in Catalan called The Boys. Between the first and final drafts, one thing was clear: Mara is gutsy. As a translator, she takes risks. She omits an ellipses and adds a paragraph break; she strays from the original. As a translator, I can’t say I’ve done the same with my work on L’Étranger.
One thing that I’ve struggled with—in working with L’Étranger and more contemporary French texts—is the comma. French authors love the comma. Sentences run on and on in ways that American sentences tend not to. All thanks to the comma. Grace à la virgule. In giving Jacquie and Irma feedback on their first translations, I realized that they too were facing similar problems with comma use in Le Petit Prince and Le Petit Chaperon rouge. Mara addressed this issue directly in class. She’s used em dashes, semi-colons, and even the experimental em dash followed by the comma. I want to be like Mara. Of course I will stay close, but this time around, I won’t be afraid to play around a bit.
That being said, Mara is working with younger texts, texts being made accessible for readers in other countries. I’m working with a classic. To translate a classic is a careful business, but I intend to play around as much as possible—as much as I see fit—without leaning towards interpretation. As a translator, I don’t want to digest concepts for the reader.