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From "The Stranger" to "The Outsider": The different English translations of "L'Etranger", the Postcolonial, and the Memorialization of Camus in Post-Imperial France
Munos, Delphine
2017In Misrahi-Barak, Judith; Devi, Srilata (Eds.) Translating the Postcolonial
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Keywords :
Albert Camus; Translation; Post-colonial
Abstract :
[en] A French writer born on North African soil and a pied-noir who opposed both the O.A.S. and the F.L.N., Albert Camus has always enjoyed a problematic status in post-imperial France, a country where the taboos surrounding the Algerian War have been kept alive by left- and right-wingers alike. While on the one hand right-wing French politicians have recurrently appealed to Pied-Noir ‘nostalgéria’ to justify their stubborn stance of non-repentance as regards the 130 years of colonization in Algeria, on the other, influential left-wing figures, such as Pierre Nora, have participated in a climate of intellectual atrophy by joining what British historian Perry Anderson has recently called “union sucrée,” that is, sugar-coated, and self-indulgent, versions of France and its colonial past. The difficult, even impossible, memorialization of Camus and his work in today’s France was evidenced again on the eve of the writer’s centenary. In 2012, the project of a major Camus exhibition in Aix-en-Provence for Marseille-Provence European Capital of Culture 2013 was stalled, following on the brutal eviction of its curator, French Algeria historian Benjamin Stora, by arch-conservative Aix-en-Provence mayor Maryse Joissains-Masini. Certainly, the subsequent absence of official celebrations in France surrounding Camus’ 100th birthday implied that the specificity of Camus’ liberal pied-noir voice would still remain silenced there for quite some time. But it also gave new momentum to U.S. historian Todd Shepard’s suggestion that the all-too-easy conflation of ‘pied-noir’ and ‘right-wing extremist’ (which has been dominant in France since the start of the Fifth Republic, at times correctly so) has helped naturalize the construction of some post-imperial ‘all-good-again’ Frenchness, in particular maintain the comforting belief that the “‘Algerian experience’ had been an unfortunate colonial detour, from which the French Republic had now escaped” (The Invention of Decolonization, 11). Can it be that Camus’s heritage is a “burning” one (cf. Stora’s Camus brûlant (2013)) because the irreconcilability of his work and commitments with the utilitarian image of the pied noir extrémiste would reveal the extent to which today’s France is dependent on this same image to keep the memory of its own involvement in colonialism at bay? This question constitutes the starting point of my discussion of Sandra Smith’s new translation of L’Etranger (2013), which appeared in the same year as two other books also inviting us to reconsider the actuality of Camus’ Algerian legacy from a non-French perspective – namely Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête, a retelling of Camus’ classic which was published in Algeria, and Arthur Goldhammer’s translation, for the first time in English, of Camus’s Algerian Chronicles, which offers the writer’s final word on the Algerian question. Taking my cue from Mona Baker, who argues that “translators […] play a crucial role in both disseminating and contesting public narratives with and across national boundaries” (Translation and Conflict, 4-5), I intend to contextualize Smith’s new translation of Camus’s classic within a broader frame of contemporary attempts at problematizing the strategic pigeonholing of Camus as colonialist, decades after Edward Said’s pronouncement that The Stranger was informed by an “incapacitated colonial sensibility” (Culture and Imperialism, 176). Lawrence Venutti has argued that “the intertextual and interdiscursive relations that a translation establishes are not merely interpretative, but also potentially interrogative” (Translation Changes Everything 182). My hypothesis is that Smith’s translation strategy, which includes the re-humanization of Meursault, creates a web of new meanings that participate in opening a space through which Camus’ anti-hero can be seen both as an outsider and an insider to French Algeria – a space that might reach backward and forward, with a potential for complicating the pieties of post-imperial France.
Research center :
CEREP - Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales - ULiège
Disciplines :
Arts & humanities: Multidisciplinary, general & others
Author, co-author :
Munos, Delphine  ;  Université de Liège > Département de langues et littératures modernes > Littérature anglaise moderne et littérature américaine
Language :
English
Title :
From "The Stranger" to "The Outsider": The different English translations of "L'Etranger", the Postcolonial, and the Memorialization of Camus in Post-Imperial France
Publication date :
2017
Main work title :
Translating the Postcolonial
Editor :
Misrahi-Barak, Judith
Devi, Srilata
Publisher :
PULM (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée), Montpellier, France
Collection name :
PoCoPages
Pages :
185-200
Peer reviewed :
Peer reviewed
Funders :
F.R.S.-FNRS - Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique [BE]
Available on ORBi :
since 12 January 2016

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