Albert Camus re-examined

If readers need a new translation of “The Stranger” to understand that Mersault was not a “monster” but “painfully without pretense,” they have not understood “The Stranger.”

Also, Andrew Sullivan, quoting Claire Messud writes:

Claire Messud picks up on another aspect of Camus’s thought – his complicated relationship to Christianity. She praises Sandra Smith’s recent translation of The Stranger for realizing the subtly religious aspects of his prose:

Camus, of course, was more complex in his atheism than we might commonly expect: he was an atheist in reaction to, and in the shadow of, a Catholicism osmotically imbued in the culture (of the French certainly, but of the pieds noirs in particular). The inescapable result is that his atheism is in constant dialogue with religion; in L’Étranger no less than in, say, La Peste.

Sandra Smith has, in her admirable translation, plucked carefully upon this thread in the novel, so that Anglophone readers might better grasp Camus’s allusions. Here is but one key example: the novel’s last line, in French, begins “Pour que tout soit consommé,…” which [Matthew] Ward translates, literally, as “For everything to be consummated.” But as Smith points out, the French carries “an echo of the last words of Jesus on the Cross: ‘Tout est consommé.’” Her chosen rendition, then, is “So that it might be finished,” a formulation that echoes Christ’s last words in the King James translation of the Bible.

Sullivan seems to imply here that just by referencing the Bible, Camus’ writing has some “religious aspects” or theological meaning beyond the reference itself. Sullivan was just vague and succinct enough to leave this open to interpretation, but as a Catholic, Sullivan seems to be implying — as the Christian narrative goes — that even atheists must necessarily infuse their writing with theology, however veiled, since all humans are God’s creation and thus endowed by the Holy Spirit with spirituality, regardless of whether one chooses to acknowledge it. Why else would Sullivan pick out this passage as one of two to highlight from this long essay on the new Camus translation.