The Plague, Again

Abstract

To demonstrate the Shinto belief in impermanence and renewal, the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan is demolished and reconstructed every twenty years. Western readers tend not to be Shintoists, but it is a truism among publishers of literary classics that every generation requires a new translation. “A true translator,” wrote the trilingual critic George Steiner, “knows that his labour belongs ‘to oblivion’ (inevitably each generation retranslates).” You do not have to wait an entire generation to locate a new version of Antigone, Don Quixote, and the Bible, each of which has been rendered into English dozens of times. Most of those do fade into the oblivion from which their often-anonymous translators never emerged. But the need for an up-to-date take becomes more apparent as the English language evolves, and as publishers sense a market for a text in the public domain. In the ecology of global culture, the task of the translator is unremitting. No matter how obsequiously faithful, no rendition is ever definitive, because the English language is a moving target. Although George Chapman’s Homer inspired John Keats, it is unreadable today. “Translators,” according to Alexander Pushkin, are “the post-horses of enlightenment.” It is necessary to replace them with fresh mounts along the way. In 1948, a year after Albert Camus published his second novel, La Peste, it appeared in English as The Plague. Although Paul Auster called translators “the shadow heroes of literature, the oftenforgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another,” the translator of The Plague, Stuart Gilbert, was hardly unknown. His name did not appear on the cover, but Gilbert (1883–1969) was known as a friend and pioneering scholar of James Joyce. He was also a prolific translator, transposing from French into English a constellation of authors including Jean Cocteau, Edouard Dujardin, André Malraux, Roger Martin du Gard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Simenon, and Alexis de Tocqueville. In 1946, Gilbert had published a translation of Camus’s first novel, L’Etranger (as The Stranger), and he would later translate Camus’s plays Caligula (as Caligula), Le Malentendu (as The Misunderstanding), L’Etat de siege (as State of Siege), and Les Justes (as The Just Assassins). An Englishman who lived most of his life in France, Gilbert was an accomplished retailer of French literature to Anglophone readers. La Peste has been translated into dozens of other languages, including Afrikaans, Catalan, Gujarati, Persian, Turkish, and Vietnamese. And there are at least two different translations of the novel into German, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish, respectively. However, for seventy-three years, Gilbert’s The Plague had been the only rendition of Camus’s novel available in English. To read Dr. Bernard Rieux’s account of how the citizens of Oran experienced an epidemic in the indeterminate year 194_, an American without French had to rely on Gilbert. However, in 2021, Knopf, the publisher of the Gilbert rendition, added another translation of The Plague to its catalog. In a gesture that surely pleases the current movement to honor the crucial role of translators, the name of Gilbert’s successor, Laura Marris, appears on the cover. At thirty-four, Marris was little more than half the age—sixtyeight—that Gilbert was when he translated The Plague. Yet she had already published translations of books by the contemporary writers Christophe Boltranski and Géraldine Schwarz and by Louis Guilloux, a close friend of Camus. Although she has insisted that she began translating Camus’s novel before the outbreak of COVID-19, Marris’s version of The Plague arrived at an opportune moment, when the book became what Elisabeth Philippe in Le Nouvel Obs called “la Bible de ces temps tourmentés” [the Bible for these tormented times]. The Plague has never been obscure; widely read and admired, it has remained TRANSLATION REVIEW 2022, VOL. 114, NO. 1, 11–16 https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2117749