Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > La peste

One of the first books of modern literature I read in high school, The Plague (La Peste) is absolutely chilling and incredibly written. Camus uses a dry tone (somewhat like Cormac McCarthy's) and a nearly emotionless narrator to describe the catastrophe in Oran, Algeria. A classic and a monumental work of existentialism, it is perhaps a valid thing to read with Drumpf likely to kill research grants to public foundations for researching cures for diseases. It is interesting to recall that 19 MILLION people died in the US in 1918-1919 due to Spanish influenza so this is not something that is limited to far away distant Africa but could arrive anywhere. For more on the spread of disease, check out Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (I reviewed it here on GR).

Funny, that paragraph above was written back in 2017 before COVID...
As for La Peste, I just re-read it and was blown away again. The town of Oran in Algeria did actually suffer the bubonic plague, but in the 1700s and 1800s. In the 1940s, when the novel is set, the population was about 200,000. A rough calculation based on the numbers in the book leads me to think that there were between 30k and 50k deaths between April and the following January, so probably about 1/4 of the population. At the beginning of the outbreak, the protagonist Dr. Rieux has an argument with another most equivocating Dr Richard and the prefer about whether they are facing the plague or something else. His argument was that, regardless of what you call it, 50% of the town will be dead if you don't do anything. It was both humorous (a satire about administrations and language) and terrifying. In fact, many of the images in the book (particularly the midnight tramways loaded with corpses headed to the crematorium) were references to the Shoah. There was also an impassioned discourse against capital punishment from one of the other major characters which was quite moving.

In high school, I read the Stuart Gilbert translation and found it great. Now that I am fluent in French, this reading was of the original. Gilbert was also Joyce’s choice for translating Ulysses into French interestingly enough. I have not read the more recent translation by Robin Buss. In any case, the original French has some great turns of phrase and descriptive passages that make it incontestably one of the monuments of 20th century literature.

I’ll compare the two with passages from the end of the novel.
Original Folio Edition:
On ne peut pas toujours tendre sa volonté et toujours se raidir, et c’est un bonheur que de délier enfin, dans l’effusion, cette gerbe de forces tressées pour la lutte. (p. 255)
Vintage Stuart Translation:
No man can live on the stretch all the time, with his energy and will-power strained to the breaking-point, and it is a joy to be able to relax at last and loosen nerves that were braced for the fight. (p. 261)
The English translation captures the image at the end of relaxing after a fight, but the French original is more poetic with is imagery of a rope being undone. Also, the first part of the original talks about will-power and being stressed to the point of rigidity, the translation to “energy” doesn’t quite match the image of “se raidir”. In an unashamed political note, I hope that I have the feeling Camus describes on the 4th of November 2020...

At the very end, the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; [...] it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-closets; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. (p. 287 - Vintage)

le bacille de la peste ne meurent ni ne disparaît jamais; qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’années endormi dans les meubles et le linge, qu’il attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs, et les paperasses, et que, peut-être, le jour viendrait où, pour le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse. (p. 279)

Between these two, the differences are more subtle. Camus talks of things “linge”, “mouchoirs”, “paperasses” whereas Gilbert talks of places “linen-chests”, “cellars”, “bookshelves”. I think that Camus was trying to emphasize that the things in our daily lives can carry the virus not so much as the places we live. As for the final image of the rats coming back, it reminds one strongly of the story of the Pied Piper. Also, the phrase “pour le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes” seems to me to refer back to Paneloux’s two sermons about the plague where he tries to say first that it is God’s judgement on the town and after witnessing the horrific death of Othon’s son, he says it is done for our learning, or “enseignment”. I find this interesting because Camus takes a more ambiguous position here than I had initially thought. The English translation using the word “enlightenment” is not really the right work in my opinion, it is more about admonition I think than enlightenment.

Maybe someone reading this can let me know how Buss dealt with these two passages.