So sánh bản dịch tiếng Anh (The Stranger) của John Gilbert và nguyên văn tiếng Pháp (L'Étranger) của Albert Camus

A writer for the New Yorker who visited Camus in his room at the Embassy Hotel found him studying the Knopf edition of his novel quizzically. Camus didn’t read English very well, but he knew something was wrong: “There are too many quotation marks in it,” he told his visitor. “I am sure that there weren’t that many quotation marks in the original.” Any chance he got, Gilbert substituted a direct quotation for Camus’s indirect speech. Even a passing remark like “I answered no” became, in Gilbert’s version, “I answered: ‘No.’” There were consequences: while Camus had chosen to use indirect speech to distance the reader from Meursault— to deprive us of direct dialogue— Gilbert apparently preferred quotations, which create an entirely different mood.  Like many talented translators faced with radical literary innovation, Gilbert wanted to make The Stranger sound good in idiomatic English. But he changed the style so drastically that anyone who knew the French and happened upon Gilbert’s translation was appalled. Thirty years later, a French professor named John Gale who had been asked to lecture on the novel to a group of students reading it in English was so taken aback by his first contact with Gilbert’s The Stranger that he wrote a manifesto, “Does America Know The Stranger?” Gilbert translates “I’ll arrive” (“ j’arriverai”) as “I should get there” and “It’s not my fault” (“ Ce n’est pas de ma faute”) as “Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know.” “I don’t know” in the French (“ je ne sais pas”) becomes “I can’t be sure” in Gilbert’s translation. Meursault isn’t indifferent in this translation— he can’t make up his mind. Gilbert substitutes complex sentence structures for Camus’s stripped-down prose, and asserts causality that Camus worked so hard to avoid. Camus writes: “I’ll take the bus and I’ll arrive in the afternoon” (“ Je prendrai l’autobus à deux heures et j’arriverai dans l’après-midi”); and Gilbert translates: “With the two o’clock bus I should get there well before nightfall.” The sentences are no longer the “islands” that so fascinated Sartre. Gilbert’s style also elevates the characters to a higher social class. Even Raymond Sintès sounds British. “You’ve knocked around the world a bit,” Sintès says to Meursault in Gilbert’s translation, where Camus reports the conversation indirectly: “he wanted to ask my advice  .  .  . since I was a man, I knew life  .  .  .” (“ il voulait me demander un conseil  .  .  . que moi, j’étais un homme, je connaissais la vie”). Camus landed in New York on March 25, 1946. On April 11, a more hesitant, classier, and vaguely more British Meursault stepped gingerly onto the pavements of American literature.

Trích: Kaplan, Alice. Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (Kindle Locations 2954-2977). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.