Damn! It appears that seeing this movie will not fit into my schedule.

[NNadir]

L'Etranger

I have always been a huge fan of Camus since discovering him.

I worked very hard, given the limitations of my French, to translate this passage from La Peste, and am proud of what came out:

Une manière commode de faire la connaissance d'une [14] ville est de chercher comment on y travaille, comment on y aime et comment on y meurt. Dans notre petite ville, est-ce l'effet du climat, tout cela se fait ensemble, du même air frénétique et absent. C'est-à-dire qu'on s'y ennuie et qu'on s'y applique à prendre des habitudes. Nos concitoyens travaillent beaucoup, mais toujours pour s'enrichir. Ils s'intéressent surtout au commerce et ils s'occupent d'abord, selon leur expression, de faire des affaires. Naturellement, ils ont du goût aussi pour les joies simples, ils aiment les femmes, le cinéma et les bains de Albert Camus, LA PESTE (1947) 11 mer. Mais, très raisonnablement, ils réservent ces plaisirs pour le samedi soir et le dimanche, essayant, les autres jours de la semaine, de gagner beaucoup d'argent. Le soir, lorsqu'ils quittent leurs bureaux, ils se réunissent à heure fixe dans les cafés, ils se promènent sur le même boulevard ou bien ils se mettent à leurs balcons. Les désirs des plus jeunes sont violents et brefs, tandis que les vices des plus âgés ne dépassent pas les associations de boulomanes, les banquets des amicales et les cercles où l'on joue gros jeu sur le hasard des cartes.

On dira sans doute que cela n'est pas particulier à notre ville et qu'en somme tous nos contemporains sont ainsi. Sans doute, rien n'est plus naturel, aujourd'hui, que de voir des gens travailler du matin au soir et choisir ensuite de perdre aux cartes, au café, et en bavardages, le temps qui leur reste pour vivre. Mais il est des villes et des pays où les gens ont, de temps en temps, le soupçon d'autre chose. En général, cela ne change pas leur vie. Seulement il y a eu le soupçon et c'est toujours cela de gagné. Oran, au contraire, est apparemment une ville sans soupçons, c'est-à-dire une ville tout à fait moderne. Il n'est pas nécessaire, en conséquence, de préciser la façon dont on s'aime chez [15] nous. Les hommes et les femmes, ou bien se dévorent rapidement dans ce qu'on appelle l'acte d'amour, ou bien s'engagent dans une longue habitude à deux. Entre ces extrêmes, il n'y a pas souvent de milieu. Cela non plus n'est pas original. À Oran comme ailleurs, faute de temps et de réflexion, on est bien obligé de s'aimer sans le savoir.

I'm - justifiably or not - proud of my translation of this passage, which strikes me as all too real:

A simple way to get to know a town is to look for how one works there, how one loves there, how one dies there. In our small city, these are all done together, an effect of the climate, in an atmosphere that is both frenetic and indifferent. One gets bored there and one starts to take on habits. Our citizens work a lot, but always to enrich themselves. Above all things, their primary interest, as one can see in their faces, is in commerce and in doing business. Of course, they have some taste for simple joys; they love women, films and swimming in the sea. But quite reasonably they reserve these pleasures for Saturday night, and Sunday; the other days of the week they work to get lots of money. In the evenings, when they leave their offices, they gather at a regular time in cafes; they walk the same streets, or happily set themselves on their balconies. The desires of the young are violent and brief, while those vices of the older ones go little beyond shooting clubs, friendly banquets, or gambling in high stakes card games.

One will be compelled to say that this is not particular to our city; many of our contemporaries are this way. Without a doubt, nothing is more natural, to see people working from morning to night and then, afterwards, squandering, on cards, in coffee shops, on gossip, the time they have left to live. Yet there are cities where there are people for whom, from time to time, there is a glimmer of other things. In general this doesn’t change their lives. There is only this glimmer, and this is what always triumphs. Oran, by contrast, is a city without such glimmers, that is to say, it is a totally modern city. It is not necessary therefore to specify how we love at home. The men and the women either rapidly devour one another very quickly in what is called an act of love, or they engage in long lives as a couple. Between these extremes, there is often no middle. Neither is this unique. In Oran, as elsewhere, we are compelled, for a lack of time and reflection, to love one another without even knowing it.

...to love one another without even knowing it...

The point in history Camus, a Pied-Noire in Algeria, represents, for me, a kind of essential record of the dying Imperial age, and on a deeper level, the agony of indifference to what life itself actually is, with, in the case of L'Etranger, an underbelly of the contempt associated with racism and sexism that so characterize our more recent, modern times.

La Peste, which I set out to translate during the Covid crisis, not ever coming close to finishing it, as the end of my life approaches, strikes me on a deeper level, even if, in the book, the character of Bernard Rieux, the doctor, was a relatively young man, albeit one involved in facing mortality. His touching bare bones description separation from his wife, who is leaving for a health sanitorium to recover (from tuberculosis? He doesn't say) moves me.

As for L'Estranger:

L'Estranger was the first Camus novel I ever read, in my early 20s, in an English translation. (I have come to recognize how translation can murder a literary work. My own effort at translations is not without that difficulty.)

I've read that the film is very good, very faithful to the novel but not without the signature of our modern times.

Unfortunately the showings do not fit into my schedule, and I don't know when there will be a showing somewhere that will.