What’s the best translation of The Plague by Camus?

Who Was Stuart Gilbert?

He was an English literary scholar, a fan and friend of James Joyce, and a translator into English of some well-known French authors.

It seems twenty-first century readers find fault with his translations for being insufficiently modern and too loose. That we’re fussier about accuracy than we used to be and we don’t talk like we did decades ago is hardly Gilbert’s fault, but it may mean we read his work less, now that we have alternatives.

About the Gilbert translation of The Plague

The New York Times: “The pleasures and perils of creative translation”
A meditation on the experience of reading several works translated from French to English, including examples of artistic license in Gilbert’s version of The Stranger by Camus. “Translators take fewer liberties nowadays.”

Translation Review: “Stuart Gilbert’s The Plague: Paraphrase or Translation?” by Peter Carpenter
This journal article concludes that it’s a paraphrase. And these days, not necessarily a very readable paraphrase.
“A translation… cannot only be assessed on the basis of its readability, although this is obviously an important consideration. It must also be looked at in terms of its faithfulness to the original…. Now the question is: has Gilbert faithfully conveyed to English-speaking readers what Camus wrote in his great novel, La Peste?1 The answer will be based on the argument that, despite the readability of Gilbert’s work, in the final analysis it is more a paraphrase than a translation.” According to Carpenter, the minor problems of Gilbert’s translation include “archaic words and expressions” that “get in the way of the modern reader’s understanding” and omissions of phrases, sentences, and even a whole paragraph. More significant are several inaccurate translations. Worse is Gilbert’s tendency to embroider, ornament, and adorn or elaborate and explain the text he was translating, thus reducing “the power of Camus’ economical style.” Examples pervade the text. Also lamented is Gilbert’s failure to use appropriately poetic language.

London Review of Books: “Pointing the Finger”
This article and several rounds of responses highlight the issues one encounters when trying to create or critique a translation. Mentions translations by both Gilbert and Buss.

Bibliomane Blog: “The Plague, by Albert Camus: A Review” by Bill Bibliomane
Bill Bibliomane (who has some French skills) says “there were many instances where I felt let down by the Gilbert translation.”

Los Angeles Review of Books: “More to Admire: On Laura Marris’s Translation of Albert Camus’s The Plague” by Robert Zaretsky
“Confident he was amplifying Camus’s language and meaning, Gilbert instead often altered them beyond recognition…. Gilbert never fails to replace clarity with clutter. Where there were shouts, there is now the waxing of massive waves; where there were fireworks there are now cataracts of colored fire; and where there was the decision to tell a story, there is now the decision to compile a chronicle. Where there wasn’t darkness, now there is. More importantly, where there were commas, there are now semicolons and colons, turning the passage’s spare yet lyrical clauses into a series of didactic bullet points. What was spare now sprawls, and what was simple now staggers.”

Extract from the Gilbert translation of The Plague:

Who was Robin Buss?

He was a British writer, film critic, polyglot, and translator with a PhD in French Literature. His translations from French include:

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• Under Fire by Henri Barbusse
• The Fall by Albert Camus
• Therese Raquin by Emile Zola
• The Princesse de Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
• On Suicide by Emile Durkheim
• Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac

You might want to read his 2006 obituary in The Independent.

About the Buss translation of The Plague

• There isn’t much said in favor of the Robin Buss translation, which is surprising; where it’s mentioned at all it is quoted to point out the shortcomings of the Gilbert translation.
• An edited version of an introduction by Tony Judt (which appeared in my copy as an afterword) is online at The Guardian, “A hero for our times”.
• I have posted a Review of The Plague by Camus (translated by Robin Buss).

Extract from the Buss translation of The Plague:

“Who is Laura Marris?”

She is an American writer, poet, and translator. She teaches creative writing at the University of Buffalo.

» Website of Laura Marris

She was already working on her translation of The Plague when the pandemic hit. Now she is working on a book of essays titled States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic.

About the Marris translation of The Plague

Los Angeles Review of Books: “More to Admire: On Laura Marris’s Translation of Albert Camus’s The Plague” by Robert Zaretsky
“[W]e can finally read the work as Camus meant it to be read. Laura Marris’s new translation of The Plague is, quite simply, the translation we need to have…. Her finished work is a marvel of clarity and poetry…. Marris gives us a work of simplicity that does not rewrite, but instead reveals the original text, as true to Camus’s meaning as to his means of expressing it. The work, in short, is marked no less by ethical than by artistic integrity.”

Vol. 1 Brooklyn: “Translating The Plague During a Pandemic: An Interview with Laura Marris” by Kevin Canfield
Marris said: “One of the ways that I tried to differentiate myself from Gilbert has to do with how he puts his own emotional response to those moments of restraint on the page. For instance, where Camus says, They got back to work—the French is very simple—Gilbert will be like, They put their shoulders to the wheel again. You can really feel Gilbert’s emotion at that moment—it’s a very moving moment. But I think it’s important for me in those moments to hold back my own feelings, so that the reader can make that emotional leap for themselves…. I love those moments where Camus turns to the sky. This was something that really attracted me during the quarantine. Camus can be so immersed in a horrible scene, something that is just heartrending—someone is dying on the operating table, treatments have failed. And then he’ll switch gears and just have a moment where the doctor goes outside and sits on a bench; he looks at the sky and he talks about the clouds. To me those were little markers of grief—tiny memorials in poetic language. And because it’s the sky, it’s a place that’s visible to everyone.”

Reading in Translation: “A Plague for Our Times: Albert Camus’ The Plague, translated from French by Laura Marris” by Andrew Martino
“Marris’ translation is lush and beautifully executed…. What struck me particularly about Marris’ translation is her ability to breathe new life into the text without sacrificing the spirit of the original.”

Yale Daily News: “Translating, teaching and reading Caums’ ‘The Plague’ during Covid-19” by Carrie Zhou
“According to Marris, the novel’s allegorical interpretation often obscures the text’s depictions of illness and the city of Oran. In her translation, she hopes to bring attention to the story’s physical spaces.”

Hopscotch Translation: “Translating The Plague and the Sky” by Heather Green
Marris traveled to Oran, the city in Algeria where the novel is set. “For me, it was very important to understand the actual sites of the book—the city walls, the old plague cemeteries from the settler-colonial era, the streets the characters traverse.” Marris doesn’t find retranslating much different from translating: “I will always look at other translations if they exist, but usually just when I find a particularly strange or confounding moment in the text. If I’ve agreed to translate a book, it’s because I have a strong sense of how it should sound. I’m never going to imagine exactly the same voice and imagery as the previous translators. But it’s like having long-distance colleagues, and asking how they solved a particular puzzle. There was one moment in The Plague about a particular kind of 1940s steam heater in a train station. I’ve never seen one in my life, but Stuart Gilbert probably had.” Does Marris find the delights of translation sustaining? “It’s a privilege to go to my desk and make these choices about the weight of a metaphor, the capturing of a thought. Even in the darkest times, I find language sustaining.”

Extract from the Marris translation of The Plague

The Best Translation of The Plague by Camus

I know some French—but not, like, a lot—and I haven’t read both the existing English translations. Still, you asked, so here’s my answer.

I recommend the Buss / Penguin translation of The Plague.

• It’s the one I read. I also read the Robin Buss translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. No complaints.
  
• The Buss / Penguin edition of The Plague has a nice afterword by Tony Judt; as far as I know, the Gilbert / Vintage edition doesn’t have any special frontmatter or backmatter.
• Various sources indicate that the Gilbert translation, being older, paraphrases more than the Buss translation.

Will the Marris translation supersede the previous translations?

• No translation is perfect; presumably the Marris translation will be said to have made corrections and improvements. Otherwise why would there be a new translation?
• Some people cling to whichever translation they read first because that translator’s voice sounds like the author’s voice to them, even though it’s not; some find that a more recent translation makes the text much more readable and enjoyable than it had been previously.

Psst! It’s not just a book about an epidemic…

The book can be read on the surface level as the story about a town in lockdown, but while the depiction is convincing, I’m pretty sure the author meant his readers to look deeper. The afterword by Tony Judt in my copy of The Plague says the book is a subtle but unmistakable allegory of wartime German occupation of France.

However, the specific danger that the characters face and the historical context in which the book’s audience originally read it don’t matter so much. What matters is the quiet, inner struggle of souls grappling with the eternal Problem of Evil. Why do bad things happen to good people, and how should we react?

A book review from 1948 says “The argument extends beyond the physical impact of the plague into metaphysical terrain” and calls the novel “a work of considerable significance and stature.”

In other words, like any good novel, The Plague has something to say to all people in all times and places.