THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13TOWARD THE ENDof January, I began to notice a
strange echo between my work and the news. A myste-
rious virus had appeared in the city of Wuhan, and
though the virus resembled previous diseases, there
was something novel about it. But I’m not a doctor, an
epidemiologist or a public health expert; I’m a literary
translator. Usually my work moves more slowly than
the events of the moment, since translation involves
lingering over the patterns of a sentence or the connota-
tions of a word. But this time the pace of my work and
the pace of the virus were eerily similar. That’s because
I’m translating Albert Camus’s novel “The Plague.”
One morning, my task was to revise a scene in which
the young doctor Rieux, realizing that plague has bro-
ken out in the Algerian city of Oran, tries to persuade
his bureaucratic colleagues that they should take the
outbreak seriously. He knows that if they don’t, half the
city will die. The city’s leader doesn’t want to alarm
people. He would prefer to avoid calling this disease
what it is. When someone says “plague,” the politician
looks at the door, making sure no rumor of this word has
escaped down the tidy administrative hallways.The
dramatic irony is delicious — like watching characters
debate the word “bomb” when there’s one ticking under
the table. Dr. Rieux is impatient. “You’re looking at the
problem wrong,” he says. “It’s not a question of vocabu-
lary, it’s a question of time.”
As I translated that sentence, I felt a fissure open
between the page and the world, like a curtain lifted
from a two-way mirror. 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 was — and is — very difficult to focus, to
navigate between each sentence and its real-time dou-
ble, to find the fuzzy edges where these reflections
meet.
“The Plague” did not come easily to Camus. He wrote
it in Oran, during World War II, when he was living in
an apartment borrowed from in-laws he disliked, and
then in wartime France, tubercular and alone, separated
from his wife after missing the last boat back to Algeria.
Unlike the shorter, harsher sentences of “The Stranger,”
which Sartre quipped could have been titled “Translated
From Silence,” the sentences of “The Plague” bear wit-
ness to the tension and monotony of illness and quaran-
tine: They stretch their lengths to match the pull of
anxious waiting. By the time the book was published in
1947, writers were looking for a way to bear witness as
well to the Nazi occupation of France, and “The Plague”
was championed as the novel of the occupation and the
Resistance. For Camus, illness was both his lived expe-
rience and a metaphor for war, the creep of fascism, the
horror of Vichy France collaborating in mass murder.
But unlike many of his contemporaries, Camus took
the long view. The heroism of the Resistance was less
important to him than how humanity could be restored
after the war. In his speech “The Human Crisis,” deliv-
ered at Columbia University in 1946, he pushed for a
postwar return to the human scale, calling hatred and
indifference “symptoms” of this crisis. He refused to let
his country off the hook for its role in spreading this
illness: “And it’s too easy, on this point, simply to accuse
Hitler and say that the snake has been destroyed, the
venom gone. Because we know perfectly well that the
venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own
hearts.”
While he knew that people carried traces of hatred, he
was also hoping those traces could be disarmed as cul-
tural antibodies. In this same speech, he called for creat-
ing “communities of thought outside parties and govern-
ments to launch a dialogue across national boundaries;
the members of these communities will affirm by their
lives and their words that this world must cease to be
the world of police, soldiers and money, and become the
world of men and women, of fruitful work and thought-
ful play.” In response to the symptoms of war, Camus
saw shared consciousness as a healing force, becoming
particularly interested in how people could develop aglobal collectivity that would protect them against na-
tionalism and fascism. Writing “The Plague” in the form
of a historical “chronicle” was a hopeful gesture, imply-
ing human continuity, a vessel to carry the memory of
war as an inoculation against future armed conflicts.
This view met with some pushback. In 1970 Sartre
said in an interview, “When I think of Camus claiming,
years later, that the German invasion was like the
plague — coming for no reason, leaving for no reason —
quel con, what a fool!”
But while Camus was writing for the moment, he was
also writing for the future. He was making art out of
what happens between antibodies and germs, expand-
ing metaphors from the molecular level. Though many
rightly interpret “The Plague” as a novel about the
collective spirit of resistance, there is also a deeper
collectivity at work: our shared antibodies, the immuni-
ty of the herd.
The truth is, as a metaphor, translation is uncomfort-
ably close to transmission. Translators move words
across borders, we open gates between one language
and the next. But it matters what is being transmitted.
Throughout “The Plague,” old Dr. Castel is trying to
develop a serum to share containing the antibodies of
patients who have survived.
I still hope that books from the past can be a kind of
serum for the future, as Camus intended his novel to be.
He knew that his book would be needed again, long
after his death, in a context he couldn’t predict or imag-
ine. Why else would he have ended it this way: “Indeed,
as he heard the cries of delight rising from the city,
Rieux remembered that this delight was always threat-
ened. For he knew what this joyous crowd did not, and
what you can read in books — that the germ of the
plague never dies or disappears, that it can lie dormant
for decades in furniture and linens, that it waits pa-
tiently in rooms, in basements, in trunks, among hand-
kerchiefs and paperwork, and that perhaps the day
would come when, for the sorrow and education of men,
the plague would revive its rats and dispatch them to
die in a happy city.” 0Essay/Camus’s Inoculation Against Hate/By Laura Marris
The French-Algerian author intended ‘The Plague’ as a serum for the future.
JOAN WONGLAURA MARRISis a writer and translator. She is at work on a
new translation of “The Plague.”