The Drinking Den Read Online Free PDF Page B

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. Myown 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