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During high school (by no means as part of the curriculum), decades ago, I stumbled upon the two “hit” novels of Albert Camus, L’Étranger (The Stranger, or The Outsider), originally published in 1942, and La Peste (The Plague), originally published in 1947. I read them in reverse chronological order, in English translation, of course. Equally of course, reading these novels as a teenager did not mean anything near really understanding these novels as a teenager, beyond the core plots and the most superficial of philosophical aspects. Yet even at the time, something felt really weird and off about reading them, particularly with respect to The Plague, something that I couldn’t figure out at all at the time. So I put both aside.
Fast forward to Q1 2020, and we all know what happened then. No surprise that sales of The Plague soared during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, as reported in multiple media outlets, such as in The Guardian by Kim Willsher in late March 2020 and in NHK World by Kentaro Saeki in July 2020. Interestingly, Saeki’s fourth interviewee had a unique connection to Camus’ The Plague:
“Laura Marris, an American author, poet and translator in Buffalo, has an intimate knowledge of the book. She's working on a new translation, due to be published in 2021.”
I didn’t re-read my old high school-era copy of The Plague during the pre-COVID vaccine early lockdown period, as I wanted to wait for this new translation by Marris. When the hardback edition of the Marris translation hit the bookstores, I got a copy. However, it had a big-time printing error, where something like 25-30 pages of the text accidentally got duplicated, so that a substantial part of the novel, in something like Part III and Part IV, was missing. I gave it a super-quick read, and duly returned the hardback (with an explanation to the bookstore staff – no idea if the publisher knew, figured out, or found out about this error), and had to wait months for the paperback version. Happily, the paperback did not have that duplication gaffe.
With the hardback, Marris has a “Translator’s Note” afterword, which notes near the start:
“Like many people, I first encountered this novel in a classroom through Stuart Gilbert’s 1948 translation – the first English version of The Plague and the version most Americans still read.”
The 1948 Stuart Gilbert (1883-1969, for the record) translation was the version that I’d read in high school. Marris then commented:
“But as Matthew Ward points out in his translator’s note for The Stranger, Gilbert brings a certain ‘paraphrastic earnestness’ to Camus. Though the work is accurate, it often includes extra adverbs or slight explanations that bring Gilbert’s own reading experience to the page….Gilbert also translated the novel in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and as a result, there is a certain impulse to make the plainer moments of the novel more ‘appropriately heroic’ for the postwar audience.”
One example that Marris cites in her afterword is the same one that she has used in multiple articles, including the NHK World piece, and also this September 2022 blog article for The Paris Review. This is how she puts it in the published Vintage International translation, in the afterword:
“Where Camus writes ‘they must begin again’ (il fallait recommencer), Gilbert elaborates with ‘they must set their shoulders to the wheel again’.”
In other words, in that one passage, Gilbert overdid it. I had this comment from Marris in mind when I finally undertook the ultimate nerd project for this diary that proves, once and for all, that 3CM really needs to get a life: namely, I read the Stuart Gilbert and the Laura Marris translations of The Plague in parallel, one sub-section at a time. Separately, I managed to find a copy of the original French text (shown at the very top of this diary, natch), which I certainly could not and cannot read in of itself, as my French is very rusty, decades-old high school level, but obviously as the definitive point of comparison to see how closely the two translations hew to Camus’ original text. My protocol here was, for each subsection, to:
• Read the Gilbert translation first
• Read the Marris translation next
• Note distinctly different choices of word or phrase
• Compare those passages with Camus’ original text
From doing this, as a result, I finally figured out, decades later, an answer to the question of what felt weird and off about reading The Plague in high school, beyond the obvious fact that my teenage self didn’t really “get it” then. The answer can be summarized in one sentence, namely that, without realizing this back in high school:
The Stuart Gilbert translation of Albert Camus’ The Plague is a bad, bad, bad, bad translation.
Or to put it another way:
The Stuart Gilbert translation of Albert Camus’ The Plague is an overbaked, overcooked, and overdone translation laden with inaccuracies.
These are harsh statements. But this overall evaluation is not at all novel. My statement is a brusquer version of what Peter Carpenter wrote in a 2011 article in Translation Review, titled “Stuart Gilbert’s The Plague: Paraphrase or Translation?” (note how Carpenter doesn’t say something like “Stuart Gilbert’s Version of Camus’ The Plague: Paraphrase or Translation?”), where he says that:
“…despite the readability of Gilbert’s work, in the final analysis it is more a paraphrase than a translation.”
Marris’ comment on the ‘il fallait recommencer’ passage is very much in line with Carpenter’s summation. Jumping back in time a bit, in a May 2020 article from the on-line literary magazine 3AM, Marris commented on the long-standing Gilbert translation, in a very diplomatic manner:
“[Gilbert] is very accurate. It’s not that he makes translation mistakes, but he tends to over-paraphrase. He sort of brings his own experience of reading the book to his translation. Where Camus will be restrained, Gilbert will write the emotion of the scene, but that’s not in the text.”
Marris was being overly kind to Gilbert, at least at the time of that interview, because Gilbert, in fact, did make translation mistakes – a lot of them – in his translation / “over-paraphrasing” of Camus’ The Plague. Perhaps she made those public statements with the subliminal realization that future generations (assuming there are any, of course) will, in turn, judge her translation the way later generations have judged / are judging Stuart Gilbert, and may not be kind to her in the way that Carpenter was then, and I am currently, being harsh to Gilbert, who obviously can’t defend himself. But from showing various further examples, you might understand why my statements are so harsh. Mistranslations appear from the start, such as in the second paragraph:
Gilbert (p. 3, Vintage Books 1972 paperback): “a thoroughly negative space”
Marris (p. 3, Vintage International 2022 paperback): “a neutral space”
Camus (p. 13, 1974 Gallimard edition): “un lieu neutre”
Even if you don’t speak or read French, it’s obvious that “neutre” does not mean “thoroughly negative”. But it gets worse.
(EDIT: 11:34 PM: Later in Part I, there is this passage where Dr. Bernard Rieux, the central character, looks out to sea and muses on the developing situation, as the idea of plague begins to sink in:
Gilbert (p. 35): “A picture rose before him of the red glow of the pyres mirrored on a wine-dark, slumberous sea, battling torches whirling sparks across the darkness, and thick, fetid smoke rising toward the watchful sky.”
Marris (p. 44): “You could imagine the glowing pyres by the calm, dark water, the battles with torches bursting sparks into the night and the thick, poisonous vapors rising into the attentive sky.”
Camus (pp. 52-53): “On pouvait imaginer les bûchers rougeoyants devant l’eau tranquille et sombre, les combats de torches dans la nuit crépitante d’étincellles et d’épaisses vapeurs empoisonnées montant vers le ciel attentif.”
Gilbert’s use use of “wine-dark” is an evocation of a classic epithet in Homer — except that Camus didn’t evoke Homer, and didn’t mention wine anywhere at all. Gilbert also turns Camus’ phrase with one noun (“les bûchers rougeoyants”) into a pair of phrases with a noun each (“of the red glow of the pyres”) that is not how Camus structured his phrasing there. Another subtle misstep by Gilbert is the use of “sea” rather than “water”, as “l’eau” means “water”, not “the sea”, where “la mer” would be more accurate, had that been Camus’ original.)
Another example that recurs in the context of one character, an old asthmatic patient of Dr. Rieux, relates to a mannerism of the asthmatic, which Marris notes in her afterword, but without saying overtly that Gilbert got it wrong here also:
“…the old asthmatic counts chickpeas (pois chiches) in the original, not green peas (pois).”
Gilbert uses the term “dried peas” on page 10 in the first reference to this vegetable, and again on page 61. Besides “chickpeas” being the more accurate word from Marris, the word chickpeas makes sense culturally, given the Mediterranean setting of Oran, Algeria. (Hummus, anyone?)
Upping the stakes even further on Stuart Gilbert’s mistranslations, another case is where he cut a sentence completely, in a passage about the character Joseph Grand, a civil servant who has been working obsessively on the first sentence of a would-be novel. Grand talks about his thought process behind his word choices, where I will bold the sentence that Gilbert cut in Camus’ original and in the Marris translation:
Gilbert (p. 97): “I’d like you to understand, Doctor. I grant you it’s easy enough to choose between a ‘but’ and an ‘and’. It’s a bit more difficult to decide between ‘and’ and ‘then’. But definitely the hardest thing may be to know whether one should put an ‘and’ or leave it out.”
Marris (p. 108): “Understand, Doctor, strictly speaking, it’s pretty each to choose between but and and. It’s already more difficult when it comes to and or then. The difficulty grows with then and next. But surely the most difficulty comes from knowing whether to put in an and, or to leave it out.”
Camus (p. 118): “Comprenez bien, Docteur. À la rigueur, c’est assez facile de choisir entre mais et et. C’est déja plus difficile d’opter entre et et puis. La difficulte grandit avec puis et ensuite. Mais, assurement, ce qu’il y a de plus difficile c’est de savoir s’il faut mettre et ou s’il ne faut pas.”
The passage is rather comic and, in a droll way, a tad drawn-out, which is the idea at this moment, to show how OCD Joseph Grand is about his opening sentence and his prose style. However, the obvious point here is that Gilbert cut a sentence that he had no business cutting. Note also that Gilbert uses single quotation marks around the pairs of words under discussion, but Camus does not, nor does Marris.
But wait: there’s more. A far more serious, and provocative (or perhaps provocative in reverse, for reasons that will be clear) case of Gilbert cutting a sentence comes in Part IV, in one of the most harrowing subsections, where several of the main characters witness the protracted last moments of a child infected with plague. I should warn that out of its full context, the bit of dialogue just before the Gilbert-cut sentence, spoken by the priest Father / Père Paneloux, may be disquieting to read. Here is the passage, with the Gilbert-cut sentence shown in bold in the Marris translation and Camus’ original. FYI, the first line of dialogue is from Dr. Castel, who has developed an anti-plague serum in the course of the novel, and the serum is being tried on the plague-stricken child:
Gilbert (pp. 201-202): “’There wasn’t any remission this morning, was there, Rieux?’
“Rieux shook his head, adding, however, that the child was putting up more resistance than one would have expected. Paneloux, who was slumped against the wall, said in a low voice:
“’So if he is to die, he will have suffered longer.’
“Light was increasing in the ward….”
Marris (p. 229): “’There was no morning remission, isn’t that right, Rieux?’
“Rieux said no, but that the child was already resisting for longer than normal. Paneloux, who seemed to sag a little against the wall, spoke in a quiet voice:
‘If he dies, he will have suffered for longer.’
“Rieux turned around sharply and opened his mouth to speak, but he stopped and made a visible effort to control hlmself, bringing his gaze back to the child.
“The light swelled in the room….”
Camus (pp. 234-235): “”Il n’y a pas eu de rémission matinale, n’est-ce-pas, Rieux?’
“Rieux dit que non, mais que l’enfant résistait depuis plus longtemps qu’il n’était normal. Paneloux, qui semblait un peu affiassé contre le mur, dit alors sourdement:
“’S’il doit mourir, il aura souffert plus longtemps.’
“Rieux se retourna brusquement vers lui et ouvrit la bouche pour parler, mais il se tut, fit un effort visible pour se dominer, et ramena son regard sur l’enfant.
“La lumière s’enflait dans la salle….”
It was a surprise to read this sentence in the Marris translation and then realize that it was absent from the Gilbert translation. This then leads, among other possible routes, into questions such as why Gilbert cut that sentence about Rieux’s reaction to Paneloux’s statement. I don’t have an obvious, easy answer, and I’ll leave that to other folks to ponder, e.g. on how “respectful” one felt obliged to be towards fictional priests in 1947-1948. BTW, Gilbert is guilty of another mistake with respect to the child, who is named Philippe in Camus’ original text, which Marris observes, but Gilbert names the child “Jacques”, for no good reason at all. It begs yet another variation on the question: why did Gilbert change that name?
But in one sense, the most egregious cut by Gilbert is before the novel even begins. Camus prefaces his narrative with a quote from Daniel Defoe (rendered in French, but of course), whose original English is:
“It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.”
For the record, this epigram is from Robinson Crusoe, rather than A Journal from the Plague Year. Marris includes this epigram. Gilbert did not, certainly not in my paperback copy (and I wasn’t able to get to a hardbound early edition to double-check). Again, the question emerges: why did Stuart Gilbert cut this? In hindsight, anyone with a decent command of French could easily have seen at the time so many places where Gilbert mistranslated Camus’ text, yet he didn’t seem to catch much criticism in his lifetime for it. Gilbert was a literary bigwig who knew James Joyce, for one, so maybe he was a case of someone with too many big-name literary friends to go after at the time. (The academics really started to tear into the quality of his translations, of both The Stranger and The Plague, only after 1969, i.e. when he wasn’t around to fight back.)
My French is nowhere near good enough to judge the full accuracy of the Laura Marris translation of Camus’ The Plague, in terms of how “good” it is. And it is much too soon to judge how long-lasting her translation will endure, compared to the 73-year head start that the Stuart Gilbert translation has had. But based on the above examples and so many more, it’s quite fair to state that Laura Marris is far more accurate than Stuart Gilbert, in making the vision of Albert Camus accessible to English-language audiences. Overall, from my very amateur perspective, Marris is cleaner and leaner in her translation compared to Gilbert. Her translation also reads well overall, and generally doesn’t feel like a mechanical ultra-literal translation that feels awkward, or literal for the sake of being literal (and the sake of not being Stuart Gilbert).
I can think of only one place where Marris mistranslates literally one phrase, in Part IV on page 268, where she translates “un mètre cinquante” as “four feet”. I take “un mètre cinquante” to mean 1.5 meters, or “one meter fifty”, to be super-literal. This is a jarring error because otherwise Marris is scrupulous about using metric measurements rather than English measurements elsewhere, along with 1.5 meters actually being closer to 5 feet in length. But it was also jarring because it was pretty much the only such mistake that I could find. This and the one missing section break mentioned earlier are her only missteps that I noted. If she makes these few tiny corrections in future printings, this would make her translation pretty close to perfect, on a purely technical level. And this one error pales in comparison to the multitude of erroneous word choices from Stuart Gilbert. To give yet one more, and final, fresh example of Gilbert’s mistakes, Camus writes on page 314, towards the end of the novel, one sentence in dialogue:
“Il y a huit jours.”
A very simple sentence. Now here are the comparative translations, good and bad, respectively:
Marris: “Eight days ago.”
Gilbert: “A week ago.”
Camus was perfectly clear when he wrote “huit jours”. But again: why did Gilbert ignore Camus’ original text? The phrase “eight days” does not mean “a week”, except in the world of The Beatles.
(CORRECTION, 11:34 PM CST: However, I do need to acknowledge that per an insightful comment below by Trottel, Marris did get one other bit incorrectly (as did I). It is from the last phrase in a description of Dr. Rieux by another character, Jean Tarrou, whose description concludes, in the 3 versions:
Gilbert (p. 28): “Always bareheaded. Looks knowledgeable.”
Marris (p. 33): “Always bareheaded. With a resigned air.”
Camus (p. 41): “Toujours nu-tête. L’air renseigné.”
In this case, Gilbert translated the first phrase accurately, and Marris clearly concurred. In the second phrase, I admit that I fell for the very similar appearance of “renseigné” and “resigned”, and didn’t double-check. Gilbert’s phrasing is actually more accurate in this instance. So one for Gilbert, one against Marris here. Likewise, another of Marris’ very few mistakes that deviates from Camus’ original occurs immediately afterwards, a presentation mistake rather than a mistranslation. Namely, Gilbert observes a sub-section break that is in Camus’ original, but Marris doesn’t, and she elides this sub-section directly into the next. This is a suggested correction for the next printing, should that happen.)
Marris’ new translation has received just two published reviews, AFAICT (excluding comparatively rare, one-off literary blogs), both positive. The one “literary mainstream media” review of Marris’ translation is from Robert Zaretsky in the Los Angeles Review of Books here, from December 2021, soon after publication of the hardback version, and is a rave. The other review (not an ideal link, but whatever) is from the University of Florida (sorry)-based literary journal Delos, by the Swiss-born literary scholar Raymond Gay-Crosier, an emeritus professor in UF’s Languages, Literatures and Cultures department, in the journal’s Spring 2022 issue. In a case of delayed gratification, the “money quotes” from Professor Gay-Crosier (first part of his last name pronounced like the English name “Guy”, BTW) on the Marris translation don’t arrive until the last two paragraphs. In the following quote, Professor Gay-Crosier compares the three English translations of the novel’s final paragraph, and says of Marris’ work:
“With rare exceptions, Marris's choice of vocabulary corresponds remarkably to Camus's style, as is the case of her entire translation of the novel.”
The Zaretsky review is quoted on the back of the paperback version, but not the Gay-Crosier review. Perhaps Marris and the publisher didn’t find this Delos review in time, since the journal is somewhat obscure and not the easiest to track down (even if I, of all people, managed to find it). And Professor Gay-Crosier’s praise may be too subtle to make for a good sound-bite quote on the back of a book. But his praise for Marris’ translation is praise nonetheless:
“The performative act of translating is akin to that of a conductor reading with faithful creativity the notes of the verbal score of the text. In this subtle and demanding exercise, Laura Marris, a poet herself, clearly succeeds and justifies the publication of a third translation of La Peste. Her version offers an admirably balanced lacework of translational accuracy, style, and tone.”
Careful readers will note his phrase “third translation of La Peste”, which implies the existence of a second translation. That second translation was by Robin Buss (1939-2006), a notable British translator of French literature whose translation of The Plague was published in 2001. From what I can tell, the Willsher article in The Guardian about the UK publisher trying to keep up with sudden 2020-quarantine demand was most probably referring to the Robin Buss translation as what Penguin UK was printing. In other words, Penguin UK quietly did their bit to put the Gilbert translation out to pasture, by printing en masse the more recent Buss translation. This was despite the fact that, according to Professor Gay-Crosier, the Buss translation didn’t really get any major reviews at the time of its publication in 2001, or not long after. As well, the Buss translation seemed pretty much confined to the UK, and didn’t make its way to the US much, if at all, so that the Gilbert translation still held sway for Americans interested in the novel. I have not read the Buss translation, for the record, but I’m willing to guess sight unseen that by default, the Buss translation has to be more accurate / less inaccurate than the Gilbert translation.
It may fairly be said that this diary is more or less / nothing or little more than an advertorial for the Laura Marris translation of Albert Camus’ The Plague. However, as the examples in the Zaretsky review, this diary, and various academic articles show, there is ample reason for this. This YT video (note the very small number of views, <700 as of this diary) from Community Bookstore Live somewhat serves the same purpose:
Given the running thread of this diary, the bit where Stuart Gilbert’s translation comes into the conversation starts at about 36:00. It actually uses the same “il fallait recommencer” passage, in a “compare and contrast” moment when host Adam Dalva reads that passage from the Gilbert translation, and Marris then follows with her own version. After the “dueling passages”, Marris quietly drives home the undertone of the fallibility of Stuart Gilbert’s translation, at 38:02:
“…there are no wheels or shoulders in the original...”
Interestingly, in the above YT video, Alice Kaplan speculates that Gilbert’s work on translating James Joyce into French may have unwittingly influenced Gilbert in the reverse process of rendering Camus into English. Kaplan and Marris (the latter was a student of the former at Yale, for the record), BTW, collaborated on the 2022 book States of Plague, a series of alternating essays on the novel, its background, and its resonance for recent times. Also, as an FYI, the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of States of Plague mentions thanks to Raymond Gay-Crosier “for his correspondence” (a long-shot possible reason for not quoting his Delos article), although I doubt that this would have affected his evaluation of Marris’ translation in his article.
The sales numbers for Marris’ new translation of The Plague on A.com seem respectable, so word of mouth on it may be getting around. Ideally, the Marris translation would get the “Oprah boost”, if this were to be a selection for Oprah’s Book Club. However, I don’t see that happening, since we humans want to be over COVID and anything that reminds us of epidemics, even though viruses never “get over” humans, but rather evolve. COVID is certainly still doing its thing with humans, as the current wave illustrates. And in terms of trying to be an “influencer” to steer people interested in The Plague towards her newer and evidently better translation, this diary will probably have little, if any, impact, outside of the DK bubble. (A pseudonym like mine for its author doesn’t exactly help with credibility.) But if you have never read Camus’ The Plague and want to read it, please run as far away from the Stuart Gilbert translation as possible. This is easy, because at least for American literary audiences, only one other running destination exists: Laura Marris is your gal there.
With that, time to turn it over to you folks. What are you reading now? Anyone read The Plague during the pandemic, or otherwise recently? Anyone else read the new Laura Marris translation? (If anyone read the Robin Buss translation, that would be impressive.) Also, please also feel free to post in the comments if you are willing and able to write a Bookchat diary in the future, although the Readers & Book Lovers admins are more in the know than myself about schedule openings and all the logistics. Otherwise, the e-floor is now yours…
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