Camus' L'Étranger: implications of translation titles - 'The Outsider', 'The Stranger', 'The Foreigner'

Camus' "L'Étranger" has the title translated as "The Outsider" in the English version by Stuart Gilbert (1946), while  "The Stranger" is the title for the American translation by Matthew Ward (1988).

The choice is a particular interpretative decision by the translators.

Readers of Camus, even in the American translation, will not be very typical. They are, as educated people in an anti-intellectual society, almost certainly (unless themselves lacking any emotional processing) used to being alienated from the brutal, exceptionalist, zero-sum game, thuggery that passes for 'Normal', there, so 'The Stranger' might be kinder to them, since strangers can be redeemed by becoming known, unlike Meursault, as an alien, a threatening "Other" to be rejected, aligning with the national psyche of exceptionalism and xenophobia.

Whilst 'outsider' is more accurate, it'd be cruel to emphasise it. It implicitly  criticises the group that does the outsiding. It forces the reader to consider the mechanisms of exclusion and their own role within them. This is perhaps a more socially reflexive and self-critical position, chiming more readily with English literary sensibilities.

The redemptive possibility that strangers can be redeemed by becoming known offers a glimmer of hope, however faint. It implies a journey, a potential for bridging a gap. It frames Meursault's condition not as a fixed social status, "outsider", but as a problem of understanding and communication. This is a fundamentally less devastating, and perhaps more palatable, framework for a reader who already feels on the margins, alienated.

In France, "un étranger" is, first and foremost, a foreigner - someone from another country, without French citizenship. This injects a colonial and social tension, before the first page is turned.

The murder of the Arab man by Meursault, a Frenchman, is hugely significant. The Frenchman is the étranger in the title, yet he is the one with power. The title is thus deeply ironic and critical of colonial society.

The French reader understands that Meursault is an étranger to the human condition itself.

He is a stranger to common emotional language. He doesn't understand its rituals (grief, love, repentance) and is therefore alien and incomprehensible to it.

He is an outsider because this failure to perform emotions excludes him from the human community. He is judged and ejected for his otherness.

The title, in French, is not a label for Meursault alone. It is a question posed to the reader and to society. It challenges the categories of "insider" and "outsider," "native" and "foreigner," "normal" and "alien."

In essence, while the English translations force a single interpretation ("The Stranger" or "The Outsider"), the original French title is the central philosophical problem of the book itself. It is a richer, more complex, and more accusing title than either of its English counterparts.

For the French reader, "L'Étranger" is a concise and devastating critique of social, colonial, and existential hypocrisy.

A better English title might have been 'The Foreigner', and, maybe, in the US, 'The Resident Alien'.

Gerard Manley Hopkins - A nun takes the veil

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Heaven—Haven

A nun takes the veil

I wonder if this might, like Robert Frost's poem about two roads diverging, be a wildly misunderstood poem. But first, some context that proves rather illuminating.

Hopkins wrote "Heaven—Haven" whilst an Anglican undergraduate at Oxford, shortly before his conversion to Catholicism. This biographical detail transforms our reading - the poem becomes not an observation of another's vocation, but Hopkins' self-examination.

Heaven—Haven
A nun takes the veil

I HAVE desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

The nun has, past tense, desired. 'I have desired'. It is not, necessarily, what she desires now.

When you 'take the veil' as a nun, you subjugate yourself deliberately to the rule of the order. You voluntarily surrender your own, personal, desires entirely.

So this poem cannot be about what the nun desires after taking the veil. Rather, it is what she desired, before she decided to have no desires, save those imposed on her by the rule.

But here lies the deeper reading: Hopkins is exploring his own motivations through this feminine persona. The poem reads more like a fuga mundi than an amor Dei - a flight from the world rather than love of God. Listen to the language: "Where springs not fail," "where flies no sharp and sided hail," "Where no storms come." This is the vocabulary of escape, of seeking refuge, not of joyful spiritual union.

The alliteration itself reinforces this sense of retreat - the harsh consonants of "sharp and sided" give way to the softer sounds of "green swell" and "havens dumb." Hopkins is crafting a tone that moves from turbulence to stillness, from engagement to withdrawal.

What's entirely absent is the gaudium of the matrimonium spirituale - that joy found throughout the Marian tradition and encapsulated in the Magnificat. This reads more like a dirge than a celebration. The imagery is one of cessation rather than transformation: springs that don't fail (rather than springs that eternally flow), storms that don't come (rather than peace that surpasses understanding).

Hopkins, writing as an Anglican contemplating Catholicism, seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of religious vocation. He presents it as an ending rather than a beginning, as the cessation of desire rather than its ultimate fulfilment in divine love.

This misapprehension may well explain why his early years as a Jesuit proved so wretched. He entered religious life expecting the quietude described in this poem - a haven from life's storms - only to discover that authentic spiritual life demands not the elimination of passion but its redirection toward divine love.

The tragedy Hopkins describes - someone with "transcendent desires for calm, peace, beauty" surrendering them for institutional obedience - reflects his own impoverished understanding of what religious commitment actually entails. The poem becomes, inadvertently, a critique of his own motivation: was his calling genuine spiritual yearning or merely sophisticated escapism?

Reading "Heaven—Haven" this way, we see JMH wrestling with whether his attraction to religious life springs from authentic vocation or from a desire to retreat from the world's complexity. The fact that he chose to explore this through the persona of a nun suggests he recognised, perhaps unconsciously, the problematic nature of his own spiritual motivations.

The poem's enduring power lies not in any celebration of religious life, but in its honest examination of the difference between true calling and mere refuge-seeking - a distinction that would prove painfully relevant to Hopkins' own subsequent struggles with his vocation.

Though, having said that, for me, the appeal is the poem itself, rather than the theology.

---

No comments:

Post a Comment

Cicadas don't always use prime numbers

They're expecting huge amount of cicadas in America this year - because the 17 year cycle cicadas are due out; they last hatched in 2008. This brood has a particularly large geographic distribution.

Last year, 2024, was also particularly active for cicadas, in North America, because two broods emerged at the same time, 13-year and 17-year broods emerged at the same time.

I think it's interesting that only American cicadas use prime numbers in this way. South African, and other cicadas, emerge most years. We called them 'Christmas Beetles' from the time of year they emerged.

We had beautifully harmonious cicadas most years in our garden in Pietermaritzburg.

Often in mid-January, in the heat, there'd be a number of cicadas in different trees singing at the same time, which created an hypnotic beat-frequency, like a stereo record, seeming to sweep backwards and forwards around the garden.

It was the perfect accompaniment to a soft, hot morning, sometimes punctuated by lawn mowers in the distance, or the sound of water sprayed from a hose.

https://www.citizen.co.za/southlands-sun/news-headlines/local-news/2023/03/06/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-life-cycle-of-cicadas/