Hemmings, including his biography in 1953,11 did something to redress the balance; so, too, did the appearance of modern translations of the major works in collections such as the present one. Leonard Tancock’s version of L’Assommoir was published by Penguin Classics in 1970. Tancock, who described this in his Introduction as ‘one of the funniest novels of the nineteenth century’, translates it in a way that stresses the element of social satire and the grotesque. In dealing with Zola’s slang, he opts for a mainly British and Cockney language that has already dated after some thirty years, and he tends actually to exaggerate the crudity of some expressions that Zola uses – so that Coupeau’s remark: ‘T’as l’air d’une nourrice’ becomes, in Tancock’s English: ‘You look like a fucking nurse.’

A version of the novel that was suitable for the early 1970s, when there was still excitement at the fact that the most commonly used sexual expletive in English could at last be set down in print, may be less appropriate at the end of the century, at a time when few people are scandalized (and fewer still surprised) to hear it spoken in films or on television, or to read it in newspapers. At any rate, nothing is achieved now by calling Zola’s plain nourrice ‘a fucking nurse’. It was time to take a new look at The Drinking Den, to produce a version that would go beyond the succès de scandale and reveal for English readers what those who read French have long been able to appreciate – a marvellous, warm and human novel, neither boringly Naturalistic, nor shockingly crude, but wonderfully evocative of its time and place, with a tragic heroine who is among the most touching and credible creations in all the literature of the nineteenth century.

FURTHER READING

Baguley, David, Emile Zola: ‘L’Assommoir’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Hemmings, F. W. J., The Life and Times of Emile Zola (1953; London: Paul Elek, 1977).

Wilson, Angus, Emile Zola, An Introductory Study of His Novels (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952).

Zola and the Craft of Fiction (Essays in Honour of F. W. J. Hemmings), ed. Robert Lethbridge and Terry Keefe (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

Slang presents a peculiar set of problems for the translator. While the standard literary dialect of a language aspires to a form of universality – wishes to be generally understood and to impose itself as the ‘correct’ form of the language – slang is very specific to a particular group of people or section of society in one place and at one time. Everyone agrees that slang is colourful and energetic, but it is not always appropriate as a means of communication. It often has the effect of defining the group that uses it and may be designed to exclude all but the initiated, as in the case of Cockney rhyming slang, school slang and the dialects that serve to distinguish one generation from its elders. Much slang can therefore be seen, not as an attempt to communicate as widely as possible, but the very opposite – in other words, as a kind of ‘anti-translation’.

The translator could try to put Zola’s French into the language of the Bronx, or the London Docklands, or the Gorbals in Glasgow; but it seems pointless, even if one has the necessary expertise, to transfer the text from one language that the English-speaking reader does not understand into another that most English-speaking readers will not understand. Moreover, because slang is so closely linked to particular places or social groups, many of the references in the book become anomalous in such a translation – references to Parisian localities, wine-drinking, foods and so on, which formed part of the culture of the French working class during the nineteenth century, but not that of Cockneys or Glaswegians or Italian-Americans, for example. To suggest that the characters were living in the London Docklands or downtown Chicago is arguably more ‘unfaithful’ to the novel than to imply that they spoke in the language of the French middle class. My own preference throughout has been to aim for comprehensibility and readability, while using enough colloquial language to convey the feel of the original.

Zola’s slang has been a problem, of course, for translators into other languages as much as into English, and the difficulty starts with the title. English has used a variety of solutions, from preserving the original French to approximate translations such as The Dram Shop or The Drunkard – and the one that I have chosen, The Drinking Den. None of them conveys the full meaning of the archaic slang word assommoir (see Introduction and note 1 to chapter 2). The problem can be seen in the solutions attempted by translators in other languages: Spanish has used La Taberna, German, Der Totschläger (The Bludgeon), Russian, Zapadnya (The Trap), Italian, La Scannatoio (The Slaughter-House). The 1956 film directed by René Clément (and ably adapted by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost) quite sensibly retitled the story Gervaise, which not only has the effect of emphasizing the centrality of the character (played by Maria Schell), but also shifts the emphasis away from the problem of alcoholism, which had been the focus of earlier film versions. This was the title that Zola himself originally meant to use; and he would have saved translators a good deal of head-scratching if only he had stuck to it.

THE DRINKING DEN

PREFACE

The Rougon-Macquart will be made up of twenty novels: the general plan was set out in 1869, since when I have followed it with extreme precision. We have come round in due course to The Drinking Den (L’Assommoir) and I have written it, as I wrote the others, without deviating for a moment from my course. This is my strength: I have a goal.

When The Drinking Den appeared in a newspaper, it was attacked with unprecedented savagery, it was denounced and accused of every crime. Do I really need, in these few lines, to explain my intentions as a writer? I set out to show the fatal collapse of a working family in the poisonous environment of our city slums. With drunkenness and laziness come the loosening of family ties, the filth of promiscuity and the gradual abandonment of decent feelings; then, in the end, shame and death. Quite simply, this is morality in action.

L’Assommoir is undoubtedly the most decent and moral of my books. I have often had to touch on quite appalling ills; but only the form has shocked.