The summer before COVID-19, Knopf commissioned a new translation of Albert Camus’s classic novel, The Plague. Though it was originally intended as an allegory of the Second World War, the past two years have transformed that reading tradition, bringing the novel close to readers who experienced the themes of the novel firsthand. In light of this context, Laura Marris will discuss the process of creating a new translation of Camus’ text—preserving his restraint and lyricism, his ideas of separation and porousness, and his deep engagement with contagion and immunity.

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Believer, The Yale Review, The Point and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship and a Daniel Varoujan Award. Recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, out from Knopf in November 2021. Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Baille-Gifford Prize in the UK, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. With Alice Kaplan, she is the co-author of States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (2022). She is currently at work on her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, which will be published by Graywolf in 2024.
 

Part of the Translation Studies Hub colloquium series.