A lifelong idol, Andre Malraux, writer, activist, spoke against the growing threats of Fascism while on a visit to Algeria. Camus reported and wrote of the criminal trials he witnessed in court, a couple of which Kaplan details, such as the trial following the murder of a conservative Islamic theologian. The trials and the courtroom scenes gave Camus several insights into ethnic tensions that prevailed in Algeria, and the absurdity of the justice system; French justice only appeared to heighten the injustices of colonialism.
As Kaplan writes, Sartre read Dashiell Hammett before he wrote Nausea , a philosophical work that reads like a detective novel. The Stranger was completed as Camus worked during the day in a dingy hotel room in Paris, while in the evenings, he worked for a newspaper set up by Pia.
It was a time of loneliness and camaraderie. As the war raged on, Camus moved from Paris to Oran in Algeria, a city on the coast, to the west of Algiers. Camus sent copies of the manuscript handwritten of course to Grenier and Pia. Paper production was strictly regulated and censorship was in place. Camus even offered to provide the paper since Alfa grass grew aplenty in Algeria for its publication. The story of how the translation came into being is equally rivetting.
It was he who translated Camus into English. The concern about the unnamed silent Arab was aired at that time in a New York Times book review. She traced the brother of the Arab, Kaddour Touil, who had been involved in that fight. Kaddour had died but, like Camus, had spent some time at a sanatorium in the Alps, recovering from tuberculosis. However, one of several severe attacks of tuberculosis forced him to drop out of school.
The poverty and illness Camus experienced as a youth greatly influenced his writing. After dropping out of the university, Camus eventually entered the world of political journalism. While working for an anti-colonialist newspaper, he wrote extensively about poverty in Algeria. He was also the editor of Combat , an important underground newspaper.
While in wartime Paris, Camus developed his philosophy of the absurd. The experience of World War II led many other intellectuals to similar conclusions.
Published in , the novel tells the story of an emotionally detached, amoral young man named Meursault. For his crime, Meursault is deemed a threat to society and sentenced to death.
We condemn or set him free based not on the crime he commits but on our assessment of him as a person. Does he love his mother? Or is he cold toward her, uncaring, even? How would we have seen Meursault then? Likely, our first impression would have been of a child speaking. Rather than being put off, we would have felt pity or sympathy. But this, too, would have presented an inaccurate view of Meursault. So how is the English-language translator to avoid unnecessarily influencing the reader?
First, the French word maman is familiar enough for an English-language reader to parse.
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