"...to love one another without even knowing it..."

[NNadir]

To brush up on my French, I've been using this extra time to work on something worthwhile, translating - how appropriate is this - Camus's La Peste, the Plague...

It's been a kind of revelation. I was struck by this paragraph in the first chapter, having known and admired someone who died in these times, which stikes at me powerfully.

My translation:

One will be compelled to say that this is not particular to our city; many of our contemporaries are this way. Without a doubt, nothing is more natural, to see people working from morning to night and then, afterwards squandering, on cards, in coffee shops, on gossip, the time they have left to live. Yet there are cities where there are people for whom, from time to time, there is a glimmer of other things. In general this doesn’t change their lives. There is only this glimmer, and this is what always triumphs. Oran, by contrast, is a city without such glimmers, that is to say, it is a totally modern city. It is not necessary therefore to specify how we love at home. The men and the women either rapidly devour one another very quickly in what is called an act of love, or they engage in long lives as a couple. Between these extremes, there is often no middle. Neither is this unique. In Oran, as elsewhere, we are compelled, for a lack of time for reflection, to love one another without even knowing it.

Suddenly it seems so much more urgent not to squander the time we have left to live.

It struck me as a powerful thought, I felt compelled to reflect on it.

"...only this glimmer, and that is what always triumphs..."

Camus was just an incredibly evocative writer, seeing in just a few words, so deeply into us all.

[dweller]

1. mind if i borrow this, with full credit attributed ?

having not read La Peste, i looked online for a translation and only found
https://archive.org/stream/plague02camu/plague02camu_djvu.txt
which is quite clumsy compared to your eloquent translation ...

thanks for your post, it is ... different from your usual

✌🏼

[NNadir]

2. Be my guest. I'm very pleased you like it. n/t.

[dweller]

3. will you finish the translation ?

at some point anyway ?

✌🏼

[NNadir]

4. Apparently the translation you linked in the same one I read as a kid.

It's the Gilbert translation from 1946. It was very widely distributed and is, apparently, still in print.

In a way that's too bad.

I asked my son, whose French is far superior to mine, to look at my translation, and in the course of reviewing it, he pulled that old paperback off the shelf; the binding is broken and its coming apart. This was the same copy I had as kid; the paperback is at least 40 years old.

We agreed that there are things in that Gilbert translation that are simply not there in the original French and that the language of the translation is stilted, awkward, and at times quite inaccurate.

This is quite surprising because I looked Gilbert up on Google, and apparently he was a literary scholar of some renown.

The difficulty of translation is that the translator necessarily brings some interpretation to a word; he or she must struggle with what each word means, not only to himself or herself, but what he or she believes, in this case, what Camus was trying to convey.

Consider this very simple sentence in French:

Le matin du 16 avril, le docteur Bernard Rieux sortit de son cabinet et buta sur un rat mort, au milieu du palier.

Gilbert translates as such:

"When leaving his Surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot."

My translation is this:

On the morning of April 19, the doctor Bernard Rieux, upon leaving his practice, was disturbed by encountering a dead rat in the middle of the landing.

There is no word for "soft" or for "foot" in the French. The use of "surgery" for "cabinet" is a bit of a stretch for an American, although probably less so for a British speaker of English; the word can also mean in many dictionaries, "office" and, in fact, it can also be what it's cognate represents, a piece of furniture. I chose in context "practice," but being British, one cannot really criticize this particular choice by Gilbert. However the word "buta" is the passe simple for the verb "buter." It can be translated as "stumbled upon" which perhaps implies a foot but not softness, but there is also a meaning in French that is <Se heurter à une difficulté> which means "to encounter a difficulty," albeit often with the word "contre" rather than "sur." My son told me he agrees, nonetheless that the "stumble upon" translation should convey a more figurative sense, as he and I interpret the French, as opposed to the more literal sense of physically tripping. One can argue the point, I suppose. In the text, this is the first rat encountered, and it comes just after the introductory section in which "the narrator" states in portentous terms that what was happening was not immediately understood by anyone.

My translation:

Here we are; one will say without any difficulty that nothing could make our citizens expect the incidents that took place in the spring of this past year were, as we understood later, the first signs of a series of serious events that are proposed to be chronicled here. The facts will seem very natural to some and to others, unlikely. Yet a narrator cannot take into account these contradictions. His task is merely to say, “This happened” when in fact he knows it happened, in fact, that it concerned all the people and that there are thousands of witnesses who will appreciate, in their hearts, the truth of what he says.

Because of context, I chose "was disturbed by encountering a dead rat" because it fits, to my mind, better with the foreshadowing of events that this paragraph clearly evokes as I read it. I chose, the figurative meaning for "buta." A consideration is that the language of the French in this part of the text involves in several places brushing past something, and then going back to consider it just a little more seriously. This, I think, on the part of Camus is extremely poetic, and extremely eloquent, and I am doing my best to capture it.

No one can say what Camus was visualizing when he wrote the text. What we have, at best, is shadows of his vision. All this said, in the times of Covid-19, it is worth it to struggle with the very things with which this great writer was struggling, this in a time that he was away from Algeria and stuck in Nazi occupied France, writing, illegally, for the resistance.

There are just too many parallels with the times in which we find ourselves living as for me to want to ignore this work. I will probably continue, in the limits of my time, to plug ahead. Whether I will finish it is too much to say. We all live like Damocles, as they did in Camus' book, and as I've seen close at hand, it would be an ultimate arrogance to assume I am immune from what is befalling humanity as a whole.