Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [12]
Two previous translators, Leonard Tancock (who did the version for Penguin Classics published in 1962, which the present translation replaces), and Andrew Rothwell (whose version for Oxford World Classics appeared in 1992), point to certain characteristics of Zola’s novel which make it ‘an awkward work to translate’ (Rothwell) and set ‘peculiar problems’ (Tancock) for the translator. One of these is Zola’s tendency to refer repeatedly to characters by certain set phrases: ‘the old haberdasher’ (for Mme Raquin); ‘the drowned man’ (for Camille); ‘the retired police commissioner’ (for Michaud). Both translators consider these to be, in Tancock’s words, ‘impossibly clumsy locutions’ and have chosen to rephrase them. I find these repetitions less bothersome than my predecessors appear to have done, and on the whole, when Zola refers to Michaud as ‘the retired police commissioner’, I do the same.
In fact, I am slightly surprised at these previous translators’ uneasiness about Zola’s style. As well as their problem with clumsy locutions, both Tancock and Rothwell feel that Zola ‘fails to graduate his climaxes’ (Tancock), ‘so that subsequent intensification can only be achieved by accumulation and repetition’ (Rothwell). Both of them have felt it was not part of the translator’s job to correct ‘such pervasive stylistic features’, but to retain them with regret. I accept that, as I point out in my Introduction, there is a problem in the limited vocabulary at Zola’s disposal to describe the mental state of the two main characters, but this is a feature of the text, and not a difficulty for the translator.
Finally, Rothwell also says that he has made ‘some alterations to the tense-sequences in certain passages’ and points to Zola’s frequent use of the imperfect tense, and that ‘it has proved necessary on occasion to decide between frequentative and narrative uses of the French imperfect tense, a distinction which Zola deliberately blurs in order to convey the monotony of the life led by the Raquin household, but which can lead to apparent temporal contradictions in English’.
In fact, Zola’s use of the imperfect is one of the characteristic features of his style. As Anne Judge and F. G. Headley say in their Reference Grammar of Modern French:1 ‘Flaubert and then, to a far greater extent, Zola are said to have “given the imperfect artistic overtones” which it never had before’, using it to place ‘the reader in the middle of the action ...’ And the ‘artistic overtones’ may be ‘artistic’ in the narrow sense as well as in the general one. Grévisse,2 talking about the same ‘narrative’ use of the imperfect, notes that it is sometimes called the ‘picturesque’ imperfect and quotes Brunetière’s ‘well-chosen description [when he says]: “it is a painter’s technique ... The imperfect, here, serves to prolong the duration of the action being described by the verb, and in a sense immobilizes it before the reader’s eyes”’ — which seems particularly significant in the case of Zola, given his interest in applying the techniques of painting to writing.
It is not possible to follow Zola’s choice of tenses precisely when translating into English, but in translating Thérèse Raquin I have been constantly aware of Zola’s use of verb tenses and have tried to find an appropriate English equivalent. I hope overall that I have managed to convey something of Zola’s style, even if his repetitions, superlatives, accumulations and imperfect tenses may occasionally