Notebooks 1951–1959

225 Pages·2008·3.88 MB·English

by  Albert Camus

NOTEBOOKS
1951-1959
OTHER RUUKS m' Albert Camas
Awarded the Nobel Prize / r Literature in 1957
NOTEBOOKS 1942-1951 1965
(Carnets, janvier 1942-mars 1951)
NOTEBOOKS 1935-1942 1963
(Carnets, mai 1935-fevrier 1942)
RESISTANCE, REBELLION, AND DEATH 1961
(Actuelles-a selection)
THE POSSESSED (Les Possed(;s) 1960
('ALIGULA AND THREE OTHER PLAYS 1958
(C(iligula, Le Malentendu, L'Etat de siege, Les Justes)
EXILE AND THE KINGDOM (L'Exil et le Royaume) 1958
THE FALL (La Chute) 1957
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS AND OTHER ESSAYS 1955
(Le Mythe de Sisyphe)
THE REBEL (L'Homnte revolte) 1954
THE PLAGUE (La Peste) 1948
THE STRANGER (L'Etraoger) 1946
NOTEBOOKS
1 9 5 11 9 5 9
BY Albert Camus
TRANS1,ATE, 1) FROM TIIE FR ENCE1, \VLI'II AN INTRODUCTION
AND AFTERWORU, BY RYAN BLOOM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY PROFOUND, deepest gratitude goes to Dr. Hassan Hodjati for his
immense and invaluable aide with this manuscript: Je ne saurais jamais assez
vous remercier. To my parents, without whom: nothing. To Herbert Lottman
and Oliver Todd for their exquisite biographies of Camus. And to Francine
and Keivan Hodjati, Ariane Bernard, Veronique de Crom-brugghe, Christen
Aragoni, and Thomas Field, all of whom have helped improve this text. Any
existing imperfections are, of course, my own.
R. B.
Paris
June 2007
TRALN'SL,ATOR'S NOTE
A WRITER'S N(rrEBOOK is a peculiar thing. To look at a writer's raw
notebooks, his unpolished jottings, is to see a man, to know his works, and to
watch them grow. It is to get a taste of the life, the human being, behind the
books and essays, even when that person has seemingly tried not to reveal
himself.
Some might contend that Camus always intended to publish his cahiers (as
he called them), or, at the very least, that by 1954 the thought had crossed his
mind when he began to have formal typescripts made of the first seven
volumes. Whether it proves intent or not, we do know that Camus corrected
these seven typescripts as they were being prepared. In the United States, after
his death, the first six of these cahiers were published in two volumes,
Notebooks 1935-1942 and Notebooks 1942-1951. Of the cahiers contained in
those previous volumes, some were fully corrected by the author and some
only partially corrected in various stages and drafts. In this third and final
volume of Camus' Notebooks, only the very first cahier (VII) was made into a
typescript while the author was still living, and even this one was only partially
corrected by the author before his death.
As established in the original French edition, the rest of what follows-
cahiers, letters, and notes-was taken straight from the original handwritten
source, unadulterated, unaltered save for a few proper names. Thus these final
cahiers presented a series of translation challenges not fully present in the two
earlier volumes. Throughout the manuscript, occasionally there occurs a word
or series of words that Camus' small, tight script renders completely illegible;
over the years many have joked that only four people could ever read his
handwriting: his wife, his lover, his daughter, and Camus himself (and
sometimes even they had to use a magnifying glass to do so). Similarly, in
some spots Camus' script seems decipherable, but certainty is impossible;
these occurrences have been recorded with the note "questionable reading" or
"unclear word," to indicate the possibility of alternative interpretations. One
can assume what they will about the earlier Notebooks, but these last volumes,
as evidenced, come to us in the raw.
This being the case, I have gone to great lengths to try to preserve the
manner of these last notebooks accurately in their translation into English.
These entries are not always solid pieces of polished prose; they are often
notes at the rudimentary level, they do not always contain complete sentences
or thoughts, and they are indeed often ambiguous. Occasionally an entry will
trail off, or words will be dropped in a sort of shorthand; sometimes Camus
has "dinner with B.M." and sometimes just "Dinner B.M." Sometimes we read
of The Fall or The Possessed, and sometimes just of Fall or Possessed.
Occasionally we get long, complex, intricate sentences, and at other times
short, clipped, elliptical sentences. These differences, though sometimes slight,
are clearly present in the original French, and when possible they have been
maintained in the English translation.
Although, for the sake of clarity, grammar and punctuation have been
edited in places, for the most part, even when an entry appears less than
grammatically perfect, even when a question mark or quotation mark is
missing, as long as this is how Camus recorded the original entry, no changes
have been made for the English translation. The intent of this precision is to
lend a certain authenticity to the true flavor of these last notebooks, sometimes
seemingly composed, other times apparently only cryptic notes the author
himself would fully understand.
That said, the greatest liberty taken with this translation involves the
insertion of commas, without which many of these entries would prove quite
difficult to read and decipher. An examination of Camus' handwritten drafts,
even of formal works such as Le Premier Homme, reveals that the author often
eschewed spaces, commas, and even periods. While fidelity has been held as
an essential ingredient in translating the particular manner of these writings, in
certain places clarity, at the sentence level, seemed just as necessary.
Finally, all the quotations cited here by Camus have been translated from
the French version that he recorded in these cahiers, not from their original
source language. In the case of quotations originally appearing in English,
often their French counterparts contain slight differences in wording and
structure, differences that have been preserved here as Camus wrote them.
Translating these cahiers has been an incredible journey, an incredible
insight into the final years of one of the French language's most enduring
writers, a voice still so relevant today, perhaps even more so than in the past.
My sincere hope is simply that you will enjoy these final pages and final
thoughts, this final and most personal glimpse, as much as I did.