Alice Kaplan from Yale University will present "How Albert Camus Became an American Writer — or at Least a Household Word."
Kaplan is John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University and founder of the Yale Translation Initiative. Her lecture will focus on the mystery of cultural transmission: What factors, other than literal translation from one language to another, go into making a foreign writer a success in the United States? Her example is the beloved French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, whose first novel, The Stranger, was published in New York in 1946 and remains the number one French novel of the 20th century. Central to the story she is telling is Camus's first major American critic, Germaine Bree, whose archives Kaplan has explored in order to understand her part in making Camus a household word.
No knowledge of French is required.
Originally published at isla.nd.edu.