What Is the American for <i> Maman?</i> : THE STRANGER <i> by Albert Camus; translated by Matthew Ward (Alfred A. Knopf: $16.95; 123 pp.) </i>

The problems of translating Camus’ first and most famous novel begin with the title, “L’Etranger,” which could be variously rendered as “The Outsider,” “The Foreigner” or “The Stranger.” Matthew Ward, in his brilliant re-creation of this masterpiece of the absurd, has chosen to call it “The Stranger,” perhaps to emphasize the alienation of the principal character (and narrator), Meursault. Incidentally, Camus’ first idea for a title was “L’Indifferent.”

There are two other English translations of “The Stranger” in print, both British. The best known is the first, which came out in 1946, four years after the original French publication. It was done by an English author, Stuart Gilbert, who had a way of ironing out the eccentricities of the text, of fluffing it up and making the strangely bare original sound a bit more normal. This is his version of the first paragraph:

“Mother died today. Or, maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.”

The French reads:

“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais pas. J’ai recu un telegramme de l’asile: ‘Mere decedee. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingues.’ Cela ne veut rien dire. C’etait peut-etre hier.”

The new Matthew Ward translation reads:

“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”

Particularly good is Ward’s, “That doesn’t mean anything,” a phrase that crops up again and again in the text. For instance, when an authority becomes disgusted with Meursault because he hadn’t shown enough sadness on the day of his mother’s death, he thinks, “I probably did love Maman, but that didn’t mean anything.” Or elsewhere, when he’s making love to his girlfriend, “She asked me if I loved her. I told her that it didn’t mean anything.” In Ward’s translation, this leitmotif is clearly sounded each time it appears. Similarly, the choice of “Maman,” which is neither as childish as “Mommy” nor as stiff as “Mother,” is an intelligent one.

When the book first came out in France during the war, a review called it “Kafka written by Hemingway.” Certainly Camus had been influenced by the American authors who first appeared in French in the 1930s--Faulkner, Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, even James M. Cain. Camus adapted the lean, hard-hitting American tone but suited it to his own purposes, which he said consisted of describing a man “without apparent consciousness.” Similarly Cesare Pavese, who translated Hemingway into Italian, turned American tough-guy spareness into a new kind of lyricism about nature and young, confused love.

Given this American influence, it’s only fitting that Ward has established the American tone in Camus’ book. English readers may wince at all of the American “gets” (“I got a telegram from the home”), but that is the way we speak, for better or for worse. There is a stripped-down simplicity about Ward’s version that throws into relief the tone of the book, which at times resembles that of Beckett without the humor.

Camus used the American style in order to emphasize the breakdown of conventional associations: “Outside the gate stood the hearse. Varnished, glossy, and oblong, it reminded me of a pencil box.” The shift in level of seriousness as well as size has a disturbing effect. Sometimes this breakdown turns into a delirium, a confusion that Ward renders with elegance:

” Then there was the church and the villagers on the sidewalks, the red geraniums on the graves in the cemetery, Perez fainting (he crumpled like a rag doll), the blood-red earth spilling over Maman’s casket, the white flesh of the roots mixed in with it, more people, voices, the village, waiting in front of a cafe, the incessant drone of the motor, and my joy when the bus entered the nest of lights that was Algiers, and I knew I was going to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours.”

As this passage reveals, for Meursault, the usual hierarchy of perception has been replaced by raw, unorganized sensations. When he tells the court he murdered a man because the sun had confused him, we feel the truth in his remark. His lack of conventional hypocrisy enrages everyone around him. Camus once said of “The Stranger,” “If a man dares to say what he truly feels, if he revolts against having to lie, then society will destroy him in the end.”

Even if we agree with the substance of Camus’ own interpretation, the curious thing is that the passing years have changed our way of reading his book. In the 1950s, it seemed a “universal” and “timeless” tale with philosophical overtones. The hero was meant to be a sort of Everyman, and the novel was intended as a classic statement of “the absurd.”

Most readers today, however, have become too conscious of the politics of racism (Meursault is white, his victim is an Arab). Similarly, feminism has made us notice that the root of Meursault’s crime is not sunstroke but violence toward a woman (the Arab is seeking vengeance for his sister, whom Meursault’s male neighbor has brutalized). Camus, an Algerian of French origin, certainly sympathized with the Arab population, but he did not live to see the bloody Algerian war for independence. I think he would have been surprised how his fable has turned into a news dispatch or at least a vivid page from recent history, a function better served by Ward than by the two earlier British translators.