He lives without a concept of past and future, living in the present. It is significant that Mersault lists the time before the death of his mother. Should the structure of the sentence remain the same- ‘Today, mother died’- or the more fluid ‘Mother died today’? While the latter sounds more Anglophonic, it carries none of the associated meaning of Camus’ original. The debate then is over the structure of the line itself. Recently, a new edition of L’Étranger was published that translated the line as ‘My mother died today’, introducing a new warmth and sentimental attachment. ‘Maman’ sits between the two and is the reason that Matthew Ward left it untranslated in his edition (he also plumped for The Stranger). Mother is too cold and formal, mum is too monosyllabic and informal. How do we translate ‘maman’? Mersault, the main character, is a cold, unfeeling outsider (or stranger) the choice of how he reacts to his mother’s death will set the tone for the novel as a whole. Moving beyond the title into the first line, one of the most famous in French literature – ‘Aujourd’hui, maman est mort’- and the debate continues.
As it is, the title is usually translated as either The Outsider or The Stranger, although The Outsider proves the less popular choice probably due to the phonic similarity between ‘stranger’ and the original title.
All of these words have some degree of claim to representing the French title, and conveying Camus’ intentions, but none of them can truly represent the meaning of the original word. In French, this word carries three associated but nevertheless distinct meanings: the stranger, the foreigner and the outsider. Take the title of Camus’ most famous book- L’Étranger. This makes the lives of translators very problematic, and the difficulties are nowhere more pronounced than in literature. A quick look at the online Oxford Dictionary shows you the extent of the meanings stemming from this simple word. Yet it carries a whole bundle of associated meanings it can signify honesty, sexuality, neatness, seriousness.
The word ‘straight’, for instance on the surface just means linear- a ‘straight road’. Whether in the euphemistic, guarded language of politics or the allusive, metaphor-heavy literary world, words always carry far more weight than just their simple face value, carrying hidden references and allusions. Translation is, at best, the science of ‘best fit’.
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