Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.

" So, famously, opens Camus's novel

L'Etranger, but it's intriguing to see how differently those two sentences have been translated, despite the
simplicity of Camus's construction. In Laredo's terse translation, he renders the opening as: "Mother died
today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." In Smith's new translation, she inserts a possessive pronoun: "My
mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know", thereby restoring Camus's protagonist, Meursault, to a
dislocating state of shock rather than the cold indifference of Laredo's version.
Smith, a Cambridge University don and translator of Némirovsky's Suite Française, has emphasised the
absurdist fault lines of Camus's novel through a less laconic translation. Camus's Algiers-set tale – of the
office worker Meursault gunning down an Arab on the beach and subsequently being sentenced to death by
the Franco-Algerian state for refusing to express regret – is partly a philosophical exploration of what Camus
called "the tender indifference of the world", but it's equally a humanist paean to Meursault's everyday
epicureanism. In this spirit, Smith is particularly sensitive when constructing Meursault's memories of Algiers
and of "a life which offered… the most subtle but most persistent of joys: the scent of summer, the
neighbourhood that I loved, a certain type of sky at night".
Camus called Meursault "a man who… agrees to die for the truth" and characterised him as "the only Christ
that we deserve". Smith fortifies the novel's biblical resonances by translating the final sentence as "So that it
might be finished, so that I might feel less alone, I could only hope that there would be many, many
spectators on the day of my execution and that they would greet me with cries of hatred", playing on Jesus's
last words ("It is finished"), to which Camus's original referred but which becomes lost if translated literally.
Nabokov wrote that "neither learning nor diligence can replace imagination or style" in the art of translation,
but Smith's version of L'Etranger is both erudite and agile. A masterpiece in itself.