From The Stranger to The Outsider: The different English translations of L’Étranger, the Postcolonial Reception of Camus’ classic, and the Memorialization of Camus in Post-Imperial France

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A French writer born on North African soil and a pied-noir who both opposed the O.A.S. and the F.L.N., Albert Camus has always enjoyed a problematic status in post-imperial France. Taking its cue from Mona Baker, who argues that ‘translators (...) play a crucial role in both disseminating and contesting public narratives with and across national boundaries’, this essay explores the various English translations of L’Étranger and situates them in relation to different epochs of reception of Camus’ classic, both in France and abroad, with a special focus on prevailing interpretations, in each of these phases, of the relationship between Camus and his native Algeria. If my initial aim is to discuss the relative invisibility of the French Algerian colonial background of L’Étranger in pre-1990s English translations of the novel, I also wish to examine the problematic ways in which the growing influence of the postcolonial paradigm in a post-1990s Anglophone context has brought L’Étranger’s colonial background centre stage, with the paradoxical result, not of elucidating, but of obscuring the most incisive colonial and postcolonial aspects of the novel. Finally, I wish to show that Sandra Smith’s recent translation of Camus’ classic creates a web of new meanings that participate in opening a space through which the protagonist of L’Étranger can be seen both as an ‘outsider’ and an ‘insider’ to French Algeria—a space that might reach backward and forward, with a potential for complicating the pieties of early post-colonial readings of the novel and of post-imperial France alike.