Even if you don't know French, you might recognize, or be able to translate, these two sentences:
"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas."
If you're not up on your existentialist literature, then here's the spoiler answer as to where this comes from. These are the opening sentences of the short novel, almost a novella,
L’Étranger, by Albert Camus, originally published in France in 1942. I'd first read
L’Étranger in English translation (natch), as
The Stranger, almost 3 decades ago (shudder). Of course, being way too young at the time to have even a clue about existentialism, I didn't really "get it". What happened recently was that I stumbled upon a copy of a newer translation at one of the fave book swap locales, so I thought: why not give it another go?
It turns out that one can actually sweat a lot over those first two sentences, even though they seem so simple and clear in grammar. More below la flippe......
The translation which I'm guessing that most of you know is the Stuart Gilbert translation from 1946. Gilbert translates the opening sentences as:
"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday, I can't be sure."
However, the newer version that I found at the book swap locale is the 1988 Matthew Ward translation, which renders the opening:
"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know."
You can see that Ward sticks with the more "French-sounding" word "Maman", rather than the more "formal" word "Mother". Ward justifies himself in the foreword to his translation thus:
"No sentence in French literature in English translation is better known than the opening sentence of The Stranger. It has become a sacred cow of sorts, and I have changed it. In his notebooks Camus recorded the observation that 'the curious feeling the son has for his mother constitutes all his sensibility.' And Sartre, in his 'Explication de L’Étranger', goes out of his way to point out Meursault's use of the child's word 'Maman' when speaking of his mother. To use the more removed, adult 'Mother' is, I believe, to change the nature of Meursault's curious feeling for her. It is to change his very sensibility."
Citation: Albert Camus, L’Étranger (The Stranger), translated by Matthew Ward. Translator's Note, p. vii (Vintage Books, 1988)
However, there are other translations from a few years before Ward's, with their own "takes" on the opening sentences. I haven't read these other translations, but from Lucian Robinson's
review of the 2012 translation by Sandra Smith, Robinson contrasts the 1982 opening of Joseph Laredo's translation with Smith's:
Laredo: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."
Smith: "My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."
The "My" in Smith's rendition is a word insertion, as Robinson acknowledges. On that basis alone, since the French "my" is not present, that would cause it to fall down, in principle, because a back-translation would read:
"Aujourd'hui, ma mère est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas."
That's not what Camus' original reads, of course.
Amusingly, if you (in this instance, 3CM the loser) were to feed the opening sentences into Google Translator, this is what pops out:
"Today, mom is dead. Or maybe yesterday, I do not know."
Google Translator, in this instance, translated the words "est morte" literally, individually, to come up with "is dead" rather than "died", which is how the 3rd person past tense of "to die" translates. It's a mildly provocative alternative translation to think about.
However, in a May 2012 blog post at The New Yorker, Ryan Bloom points out another problem with Ward's translation, while praising his choice of retaining "Maman":
'The linguistic fluency of any good translator tells them that, syntactically, "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte,” is not the most fluid English sentence. So rather than the more literal translation, "Today, Mother has died," we get, "Mother died today," which is the smoother, more natural rendering. But the question is: In changing the sentence’s syntax, are we also changing its logic, its "mystical" deeper meaning?
The answer is a resounding oui!
Rendering the line as "Mother died today" completely neglects a specific ordering of ideas that offer insight into Meursault’s inner psyche. Throughout the course of the novel, the reader comes to see that Meursault is a character who, first and foremost, lives for the moment. He does not consciously dwell on the past; he does not worry about the future. What matters is today. The single most important factor of his being is right now.'
Bloom then lays down the law on what he thinks the opening sentence should be:
'The ordering of words in Camus’s first sentence is no accident: today is interrupted by Maman’s death. The sentence, the one we have yet to see correctly rendered in an English translation of L’Étranger, should read: “Today, Maman died.”'
This blog post was from before the publication of Smith's translation, but that's moot, since she didn't follow Bloom's idea either. Maybe at some point someone will get to that. (Bloom himself, perhaps?) So you can argue that the opening two sentences should ideally read in English:
"Today, Maman died. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."
This is quite a bit of DK time to spend (waste?) on what seems quite trivial, two sentences in an admittedly famous novel, albeit when more pressing issues are upon us now all over the world. But the point here, besides being some sort of brief diversion from said cares and pressing issues, is that unless you are fluent in all languages of the world, if you want to learn more about the literature from other countries and languages, the only way to learn is through translations. So the quality of translations matters greatly. This little, perhaps rather pointless, exercise shows how daunting the challenge is.
Plus, to enhance further 3CM's loser credentials, other factors in the loserness of his choice of topic here are:
(a) Camus' centenary was last year, not this year.
(b) This translation has been out for over 25 years, but only recently did 3CM get around to it. So (a) and (b) show you just how far behind the curve 3CM is generally.
(c) I had to think of something to write about fast, as the other subjects that came to mind would have taken far too long.
BTW, looking ahead:
(1) Next week's edition is intended to be another opera mash-up edition, based on the Metropolitan Opera's HD-cast next Saturday of Werther. So if any of you are inclined to see it, forewarned is forearmed, and such.
(2) In 2 weeks, I can't do SNLC that Saturday night. If anyone wants to cover, please let me know.
Of course, if I wanted to, I could have made this a disquisition on the loserness of Meursault, the narrator and main character of L’Étranger, especially his utter inability to have a clue about how to give a decent impression to strangers (no pun intended there), but no time for that.
With that, time for the usual Loser's Club, protocol, namely your loser stories of the week.....