THE last novel by Albert Camus, titled The First Man, which was published posthumously, has been translated into Urdu. This may serve as pleasant news for the readers of Urdu literature, more particularly those interested in modern fiction.
This translation by Razi Mujtaba has appeared in the latest issue of Mukalama, a literary journal published from Karachi under the editorship of Mubeen Mirza. But the journal has brought out two issues numbered 10 and 11 at the same time. Each of these two issues, which runs into about a thousand pages, offers to its readers a rich variety of literary writings both in prose and poetry. Finding myself unable to do justice to all these writings in the limited space of this column, I have limited myself to the novel by Camus. But I have one more reason for this choice. Camus has been a very familiar name in the Urdu literary world. His novels were received here with eagerness and enthusiasm. But somehow The First Man had till now gone unnoticed.
Here, I am reminded of the ’50s when Sartre and Camus were in vogue in our literary world. They, with their fiction and with their philosophical writings, appeared to us to stand for what was most modern in literature. They were treated as literary twins. But if in later years we developed a liking more for Sartre than for Camus, it was for reasons other than literary. Two factors in particular played a part in this respect. One was Sartre’s unqualified support for the Algerians’ freedom struggle about which Camus had certain reservations. The other was Sartre’s refusal to accept the Nobel Prize which Camus did gladly. Most of all, Mohammad Hasan Askari debunked Camus and acclaimed Sartre on these two counts.
But notwithstanding this situation, Urdu translators felt more attracted to Camus than to Sartre. Perhaps one thing which contributed to this attraction was the thinness of his novels. Whatever the reason, his novels in general were warmly welcomed and translated into Urdu. In the case of The Outsider, his most acclaimed novel, we have three translations in Urdu. One is Afzal Iqbal’s, which was published with an introduction from Mohammad Hasan Askari. Fall was translated by Prof Mohammad Umar Memon. Plague, too, was translated in those years. So all the three best known novels by Camus were rendered into Urdu. And now his fourth important novel, though unfinished, has been translated.
The First Man has a history of its own. Camus had been extraordinarily brief in all his novels. But this one was expected to be a voluminous one, running into several hundred pages. It had been planned as a dastan of Algeria, beginning with the arrival of the French in that land. The plan included a depiction of the Second World War and the Resistance Movement. He had started well with his plan, but could not carry it out due to his untimely death. He was killed in a road accident in 1960. Thus, the novel which began with an ambitious plan remained unfinished.
After the death of Camus the unfinished manuscript of the novel went into the custody of his wife, who thought it fit not to publish it. It was only after her death in 1979 that his daughter, Catherine, had access to the manuscript. She managed to publish it in 1994.
Catherine Camus has, in the foreword to the English edition, explained the reason for the delay in its publication. She tells us that in his last years, Camus was almost an isolated man. By criticizing Stalin’s regime and by differing with French intellectuals on the question of Algeria, he had antagonized both the right and the left. “Under these circumstances,” she says, “to have published an unfinished manuscript, 144 handwritten pages often lacking full points and commas, never revised, might well have given ammunition to those who were saying Camus was finished as a writer.”
Because of this fear, the novel had to wait 35 years for publication. By the time she died and the manuscript came into the possession of the daughter, hostility against Camus had subsided and she decided to publish it.
Catherine is of the opinion that her father “was a very reserved man and would, no doubt, have masked his own feelings far more in its final version,” and adds, “it seems to me that one can most clearly hear my father’s voice in this text because of its very rawness.”
The novel has an autobiographical touch. In the words of a reviewer, it “brings us closer to the private man than one would have thought possible.”
Razi Mujtaba has sensibly translated it under the title, Pehla Aadmi. What is admirable is his faithfulness to the text.
THE last novel by Albert Camus, titled The First Man, which was published posthumously, has been translated into Urdu. This may serve as pleasant news for the readers of Urdu literature, more particularly those interested in modern fiction.
