Camus's Algiers-set tale – of the office worker Meursault gunning down an Arab on the beach and subsequently being sentenced to death by the Franco-Algerian state for refusing to express regret – is partly a philosophical exploration of what Camus called "the tender indifference of the world", but it's equally a humanist paean to Meursault's everyday epicureanism. Smith, a Cambridge University don and translator of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, has emphasised the absurdist fault lines of Camus's novel through a less laconic, more expansive translation than Laredo's. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know", thereby restoring Camus's protagonist, Meursault, to a dislocating state of shock rather than the cold indifference of Laredo's version. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." In Sandra Smith's new translation, she inserts a possessive pronoun: "My mother died today. In Joseph Laredo's terse, widely read 1982 translation, he renders the opening as: "Mother died today. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas." So, famously, opens Albert Camus's 1942 novel L'Etranger, but it's intriguing to see how differently those two sentences have been translated, despite the simplicity of Camus's construction.
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