“The Plague” did not come easily to Camus. It was - and is - very difficult to focus, to navigate between each sentence and its real-time double, to find the fuzzy edges where these reflections meet. When I looked at the text, I saw the world behind it - the ambulance sirens of Bergamo, the quarantine of Hubei province, the odd disjunction between spring flowers at the market and hospital ships in the news.
“It’s not a question of vocabulary, it’s a question of time.”Īs I translated that sentence, I felt a fissure open between the page and the world, like a curtain lifted from a two-way mirror.
“You’re looking at the problem wrong,” he says. The dramatic irony is delicious - like watching characters debate the word “bomb” when there’s one ticking under the table. When someone says “plague,” the politician looks at the door, making sure no rumor of this word has escaped down the tidy administrative hallways. He would prefer to avoid calling this disease what it is. The city’s leader doesn’t want to alarm people. He knows that if they don’t, half the city will die. One morning, my task was to revise a scene in which the young doctor Rieux, realizing that plague has broken out in the Algerian city of Oran, tries to persuade his bureaucratic colleagues that they should take the outbreak seriously. That’s because I’m translating Albert Camus’s novel “The Plague.”
But this time the pace of my work and the pace of the virus were eerily similar. Usually my work moves more slowly than the events of the moment, since translation involves lingering over the patterns of a sentence or the connotations of a word. But I’m not a doctor, an epidemiologist or a public health expert I’m a literary translator. A mysterious virus had appeared in the city of Wuhan, and though the virus resembled previous diseases, there was something novel about it. Toward the end of January, I began to notice a strange echo between my work and the news.
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