Perhaps if translators were to leave the word in its original French- maman-which connotes something between the formal “Mother” and childish “Mommy”-we would see Meursault differently. For decades, Anglophone readers have come to know Meursault “through the detached formality of his statement.” Recent commentary on The Stranger in English has turned, almost obsessively, on the translation of the novel’s first sentence: Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Typically, as in that first British edition, the line has been rendered “Mother died today”-using a “static, archetypal term… like calling the family dog ‘Dog’ or a husband ‘Husband,’” writes Ryan Bloom in The New Yorker. Part of the difficulty, Hudon alleged, was down to Camus himself, who made available his journals and manuscripts, thus encouraging over-interpretation. In 1955, Camus remarked, “I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’” The book has been read and taught in light of this general statement ever since. Maybe there is never the “magnificently naked purity of the text” Hudon eulogizes. Almost everyone has approached Camus and L’Etranger bound by his own tradition, prejudices, or critical apparatus.” But maybe we cannot do otherwise. The import of Camus’ 1942 novel-translated as The Outsider in the first British edition, with its introduction by despairing literary critic Cyril Connolly-became such a hobby horse for critics that Louis Hudon wrote in 1960, “ L’Etranger no longer exists…. He ambles into a scene, sees a stranger coming toward him, and fires five shots, commenting-in language that recalls the impersonal copspeak of a “discharged weapon”-that “the trigger gave.” Meursault is not a police officer, he has not been called to a scene.

He thinks, perhaps, it may have been the sun in his eyes. My mind has been drawn to lately Albert Camus’ The Stranger, in which an alienated French-Algerian man, simply called Meursault, shoots a nameless “Arab,” for no particular reason that he can divine.

It is closing-time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair –Cyril Connolly

The stranger outsider