The Beast Within - Emile Zola [23]
The achievements and insights of previous translators and film-makers have acted as an inspiration and encouragement in the preparation of this new translation. Given the novel’s violent subject matter, the writing displays a remarkable reserve and sobriety. This is not the Zola that the Duchesse de Guermantes delights in referring to as ‘the Homer of the sewers’1. The use of idiomatic or colloquial French is limited; ‘expletives’ are few and far between, and fairly mild when they do occur. Zola makes considerable use of free indirect speech, which allows him to transcribe conversations and direct exchanges with a degree of formality that direct speech would lack. There is a controlled precision in the novel’s description of even the most violent scenes, which suggests that Zola was consciously trying to avoid the sensationalism that his subject matter could so easily engender. The violence contained within the novel emerges all the more forcefully as a result of this stylistic restraint. Joanna Richardson’s claim that ‘there is no beauty in La Bête humaine‘2is untenable. Contained within Zola’s closely restrained narrative there are moments of poetic expressiveness, when, like the pent-up forces that the novel describes, the language opens out and moves into a different register. The ‘Impressionist’ play of steam, mists and sunlight at the beginning of the novel, the sombre grandeur of the winter’s night as the express prepares to leave (chapter I), the idyllic picture of dawn rising over Le Havre with the last stars fading in the sky and a salty breeze blowing in from the sea (chapter III), the more macabre lyricism of Séverine’s confession in the still of the night as the stove casts a sinister red glow on the ceiling above (chapter VIII), these are moments of varied and intense suggestive power that serve to complement the stark realities around which the novel is structured. This translation attempts to recreate the balance of staid, measured narrative and poetic suggestiveness that distinguish Zola’s text. The title The Beast Within may appear somewhat gothic. It is based on an image that rears throughout the novel, applied initially to Roubaud (chapter I) and subsequently to the central protagonist, Lantier.
NOTES
1 Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 498.
2 Joanna Richardson, review of Alec Brown’s translation of La Bête humaine, Time and Tide 39 (24 May 1958), pp. 650 — 51.
A Note on Money
Zola is determined to give his novel a sense of contemporary realism, and he is specific about money throughout. The figures he mentions would have made more immediate sense to readers of Zola’s time. Their force is inevitably diluted for the present-day reader. The following summary of incomes, expenditures, inheritances and property values gives an idea of how characters in the novel are placed financially relative to each other. The basic unit of French currency under the Second Empire was the franc.
At the upper end of the scale there are fortunes which are incalculable.
Grandmorin is put at 3,700,000 francs. In his will he makes bequests on a lavish scale. The property at La Croix-de-Maufras is valued at 40,000 francs. Séverine receives a dowry of 10,000 francs from Grandmorin when she marries Roubaud. When he is murdered, Grandmorin is carrying 10,000 francs on his person, money from a business transaction which he owes his sister.
Grandmorin’s sister, Madame Bonnehon, is also extremely rich, having inherited the château at Doinville from her parents and also large amounts of money from her deceased husband, a successful factory owner. Madame Bonnehon is beyond