TEHRAN – Albert Camus’ novella “The Stranger” has recently appeared in Persian from Hermes.

Originally published in 1942, the book has been translated into Persian by Mohammadreza Parsayar.

With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, “The Stranger”, Camus’s masterpiece, gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach.

Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd” and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. 

An English translation by Matthew Ward with an introduction by Peter Dunwoodie was published in 1989. 

“‘The Stranger’ is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity,” Dunwoodie wrote in the introduction.

Also published in English as “The Outsider”, the novella has received critical acclaim for Camus’ philosophical outlook, absurdism, syntactic structure and existentialism, particularly within its final chapter.

Le Monde ranked “The Stranger” as number one on its 100 Books of the 20th Century.

It has twice been adapted for film – “Lo Straniero (1967) and “Yazgi” (2001).

Photo: Front cover of the Persian translation of Albert Camus’ novella “The Stranger”.

MMS/YAW