As I'm working on my new translation of The Myth of Sisyphus, one of the things I've been doing is tracking down the original source of every text he quotes. And then instead of translating the quote into English myself — losing information every time, given that Camus's quote is almost always itself a translation from some third language into French — I find a preexisting English translation and copy that. The result is often a lot more evocative than anything I could've come up with.
One of my favorite examples is when Camus quotes the character Frieda from Kafka's The Castle. The 1955 translation follows Camus's French text, and ends up with this:
The very people around him become attached to that void and that nameless pain, as if suffering assumed in this case a privileged aspect. "How I need you,” Frieda says to K. “How forsaken I feel, since knowing you, when you are not with me."1
(from The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O'Brien, 1955)
Pretty compelling, right? But after I tracked down the passage in Mark Harman's translation of The Castle, I discovered a voice of "nameless pain" that was even more agonized:
Every character around him seizes upon void and nameless pain, as if suffering assumes here a sublime aspect. "How I need your closeness," says Frieda to K., "how lost I am ever since I came to know you without your closeness."2
(from The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Alexandre Elias, 2024, and The Castle, translated by Mark Harman, 1998)
(from Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Albert Camus, 1942) Ceux-mêmes qui l’entourent s’éprennent de ce vide et de cette douleur qui n’a pas de nom, comme si la souffrance revêtait ici un visage privilégié. «Que j’ai besoin de toi, dit Frieda à K... Comme je me sens abandonnée, depuis que je te connais, quand tu n’es pas près de moi.»
(from Das Schloß by Franz Kafka, 1922) ... wie brauche ich deine Nähe, wie bin ich seitdem ich dich kenne ohne deine Nähe verlassen ...