EIGHTY-TWO years after Albert Camus’ L’Etranger (The Stranger) saw the light of day and entered into the pantheon of greatest books ever written, internationally recognised artist Sarah Beckett has launched her book of poetry exploring the mind of the Franco-Algerian writer. I Wrote my Heart across an Unknown Sky: Homage to Camus, and all the poems contained in its 63 pages are exactly that - a tribute to one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Her poems were inspired by Camus’ writings and notebooks.
The process Beckett used when writing the book is called versioning, where she takes the sense and feeling of what Camus has written and uses her own imagination and phraseology to make the leap into poetry. In other words, she has written the poems as if she were Camus. Beckett’s tribute to Camus was many years in the making.
The British transplant who has been living in Trinidad for more than 60 years first discovered the writer at the age of 16 when she was living and studying in France. At that time she was still too young to understand his ideology, or grasp his deep interest in philosophy which was reflected in his writings. Ten years later however, she picked up his collection of writings and began a lifelong love affair with Camus.
He was a man with a towering intellect and wrote at a time when the whole world in a sense, and Europe, in particular, was devastated. There was a great growth of despair among the thinkers and writers about the world which pr.
