“Reading The Stranger is a rite of passage. Its hold continues to this day, more than 70 years after its original publication. Gilbert’s translation has numerous flaws, and has since been supplanted by Matthew Ward’s, but as Alice Kaplan argues in her outstanding new book Looking for ‘The Stranger’: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic, “by some miracle of literary transmission, the many problems with the Gilbert translation did not stand in the way of English-speaking readers grasping what was essential about The Stranger, and the force of the original came through, allowing the novel to take hold.” How many readers of Camus’s novel would say the same? I, for one, when I first read Stuart Gilbert’s English translation in high school. Solomon once said of Albert Camus’s The Stranger: “It marked, when I first read it in high school, one of those ‘existential’ turning points in my life.” The American existentialist philosopher Robert C.
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