'Mother died today' should be 'Today, Maman died': Ryan Bloom
(NEWSER) - Albert Camus' The Stranger opens with the famous—and relatively easy to translate—"Aujourd’hui, maman est morte." It's so easy, in fact, that not a single English translation has gotten it right, writes Ryan Bloom in the New Yorker . He argues that the precise wording of the first line has major implications on the way the reader perceives the narrator and protagonist, Meursault, and finds the translations to-date syntactically and emotionally off-key. Bloom walks readers through the line's evolution: More»
