The sea nymphs with their own eyes, bodies bareĪs far as the breasts jutting out of the white rapid. It is this shift which contains the emphatic and provocative affirmation and denial: illa, atque alia, … luce. That said, verses one to eleven are also preliminary exposition in summary and the poem’s first scene occurs at verse twelve when we shift from backstory as the Argo launches. To the waves of Phasis and the territories of Aeetes… That is the quondam in the opening verse and it transports the invested reader to the time of Myth.ĭicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undasĪre said to have swum through Neptune’s clear waters However, illa luce is not the first temporal marker in the text of Catullus 64. Mersault himself lives in the ‘now’ and the ordering of the opening line ‘offer insight into Mersault’s inner psyche.’ The narrative of L’Étranger then begins ‘Today’. L’Étranger’ s ‘ Aujourd’hui ’, Bloom argues, comes first for a reason. The common elements here are an opening temporal deictic marker and the problematic translation of a noun. And in the course of reading his argument Aujourd’hui, maman est morte triggered in this reader a recollection. Bloom’s anxiety is that all the proposed translations carry preconceptions that might influence the reader and generate an affinity (or lack of affinity) with Mersault. Mother? Mommy? Mum? Ryan Bloom’s article Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be highlights the importance of first impressions, and how translation affects the reader’s expectations. The French word maman hangs somewhere between the two extremes: it’s neither the cold and distant “mother” nor the overly childlike “mommy.” In English, “mom” might seem the closest fit for Camus’s sentence, but there’s still something off-putting and abrupt about the single-syllable word the two-syllable maman has a touch of softness and warmth that is lost with “mom”’ (Bloom 2012). The truth is that neither of these translations-“Mother” or “Mommy”-ring true to the original. But this, too, would have presented an inaccurate view of Meursault. Rather than being put off, we would have felt pity or sympathy. ‘What if the opening line had read, “Mommy died today”? How would we have seen Meursault then? Likely, our first impression would have been of a child speaking.
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