The Outsider, by Albert Camus, commences with one of the most celebrated sentences in twentieth-century literature: 'Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.' Four words in French. And within them, in a single one of them, lies a translation dilemma that has remained unresolved for eighty years and which reveals more about the nature of a work than it might initially appear.
The word in question is maman. In Spanish, we translate it almost instinctively as 'mamá', and we are correct to do so, as we share the register: maman is the term by which a French person, both as a child and as an adult, addresses their mother with affection and familiarity. It is neither the neutral and somewhat distant mère, 'mother', nor a term restricted to a single stage of childhood. It is the warm word of intimacy, which an adult man may continue to use without appearing unusual. The difficulty arose when rendering the sentence into English, which possesses no equivalent for maman. And thus began a protracted history.
The first English translation, by Stuart Gilbert in 1946, rendered the sentence as “Mother died today”. Mother is correct; it designates the mother, it is not an error. But it is the formal word, the distant one, the one an English speaker does not use to address their mother with affection. And for more than forty years, Anglo-Saxon readers entered the novel through that cold door. Subsequent translations in the eighties maintained “Mother”. Until 1988, when Matthew Ward did something different: he left the word in French. “Maman died today.” He renounced translating it, because no English word sufficed, and preferred to preserve the original term rather than falsify its temperature.
Critics have noted, and with justification, that the choice between Mother and Maman alters the tone of the protagonist from the very first line. Meursault, the narrator, is a man who does not express his sentiments as is expected of him, and who, by the conclusion of the book, is judged and condemned as much for a crime as for failing to weep at his mother's funeral. Should the reader commence with 'Mother died today', with that formal coldness, they begin to judge Meursault as a distant being from the opening sentence. Should they commence with 'Maman', with its weight of affection, the initial distance is altered, and perhaps their verdict regarding the character is as well. A single word calibrates the affective temperature at which we encounter an individual.
However, one must not exaggerate, tempting as it may be. It is not true that “Mother” ruined the novel for forty years, nor that a single word can, by itself, alter an entire book. Meursault’s character is constructed from many elements: his detached manner of narration, his actions, his apparent indifference, the final trial. The first word does not determine the reading; it sets the tone. Nor did Gilbert “translate poorly”: he made a decision regarding register that diminished the affection without falsifying the meaning. What Ward did was not to correct an error, but to choose something else: to sacrifice naturalness (a French word embedded in an English sentence sounds strange, foreign) in exchange for preserving the temperature. He gained warmth and lost fluidity. There is no translation without that type of renunciation.
That is the crux of the matter, and it extends beyond Camus. Is The Stranger in English the same work as L’Étranger in French? Regarding the plot, yes: the same events occur, the mother dies, there is a crime, there is a trial. But there is a layer of the work—the tone, the precise temperature of each word, the affective distance from which it is narrated—that cannot be transferred intact because it depends on resonances that each language possesses, and others do not. Maman carries eighty years of French intimacy that mother does not carry in English. It can be approximated, circled, compensated for. It cannot be copied. And that layer is not mere ornamentation: in a novel about a man condemned for his emotional temperature, the temperature of the words is almost everything.
Thus, the question of whether a translated work is the same work has no single answer, and Camus’s sentence demonstrates this better than any theory. It is the same in what can be transferred—the plot—and it is another in what cannot—the way it sounds. Each translation is a version that saves what is transferable and negotiates the rest, word by word, losing here to gain there. When we read Camus in Spanish or English, we read his novel and simultaneously an interpretation of it, the one a translator decided upon at every point where the languages did not coincide. The work we believe we are reading is also, always, the one someone chose for us because they could not say maman in our language.
On the open conversation
This text begins with a verified case—the first sentence of Camus’s The Stranger and its various English translations (Gilbert, 1946, “Mother”; Ward, 1988, “Maman”)—to ask whether a translated work is the same work. I maintain that what is transferable (the plot) is preserved, and that the tone, the affective temperature of each word, is not transferred intact. I distinguish the fact (the translations, their dates) from the critical interpretation, and I avoid two exaggerations: that “Mother” is an error, and that a single word determines the reading of the entire novel. This is the first text in this notebook on translation, a field I wish to explore. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of translation studies, comparative literature, or the theory of the work, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Albert Camus, L’Étranger (Gallimard, 1942): “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.”
English translations: Stuart Gilbert (1946, “Mother died today”); Joseph Laredo and Kate Griffith (1982, “Mother”); Matthew Ward (1988 / Vintage 1989, “Maman died today”); Sandra Smith (2012, “My mother died today”).
Translation studies analysis: Jonathan Kaplansky, “Outside The Stranger? English Retranslations of Camus’ L’Étranger” (Palimpsestes); Debora Ross, “‘Maman’ or ‘Mother’: Word Choice in Translations of Camus’ L’Étranger” (Simon Fraser University); interview with Matthew Ward, The New York Times, 18 April 1988.
Regarding “maman”: Académie française and TLFi (CNRTL). Regarding Meursault: Camus’s 1955 preface to an American edition.