L’épreuve de L’Étranger : Alberto Zevi traduit Albert Camus

Abstract

This article focuses on Alberto Zevi’s 1947 Italian translation of L’Étranger. Particularly respectful of the style used by Albert Camus in his first novel, it is compared with Stuart Gilbert’s The Outsider (1946) and then to Sergio Claudio Perroni’s (2015) recent Italian retranslation. Zevi's “literalism” is strikingly modern when contrasted with Gilbert’s much more traditional “domesticating” approach. Moreover, because it was discreet and moderate, without embellishments or paraphrases, the first Straniero remained an unchallenged reference for decades, to the point of singularly complicating the retranslation project entrusted to Perroni.

Keywords

• Camus (Albert)
• Étranger (L’)
• Zevi (Alberto)
• Straniero (Lo)
• literary translation
• parataxis